Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book-the summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars of the book-is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology.
Traversing four millennia, Martin offers a chronicle of writing as a cultural system, a means of communication, and a history of technologies. He shows how the written word originated, how it spread, and how it figured in the evolution of civilization. Using as his center the role of printing in making the written way of thinking dominant, Martin...