This unique, ambitious and entertaining book presents twenty-nine scripts in detail and offers examples of a hundred more. Written in nontechnical prose and organized into brief but comprehensive sections, it will serve as a handy reference for world travelers, stamp collectors, and calligraphers, along with providing hours of reading enjoyment to those who are fascinated by the written symbol itself.

The scripts covered here are from all over the world. A few, like Greek or the Cyrillic script used for Russian, may be familiar to readers of Western languages. But others may seem strange,...