Inventing the Alphabet

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and a distinguished professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, and Getty Fellowships and in 2019 was the inaugural Distinguished Senior Humanities Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Her artist books are included in museums and libraries in North America and Europe, and her creative work was the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks 1972-2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects. Her publications include Visualizing Interpretation, Iliazd: Meta-biography of a Modernist, and The Digital Humanities Coursebook.

• Introduction1. When Did the Alphabet Become "Greek"?2. Divine Gifts: Original Letters, Moses, and the Tablets at Mount Sinai3. Medieval Copyists: Magical Letters, Mythic Scripts, and Exotic Alphabets4. The Confusion of Tongues and Compendia of Scripts5. Antiquity Explained: The Origin and Progress of Letters6. The Rhetoric of Tables and the Harmony of Alphabets7. Modern Archaeology: Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place8. Reading the Early Alphabet: Epigraphy and Paleography9. Alphabet Effects and the Politics of ScriptCoda: Alphabetic Agency and Global HegemonyNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

"[Drucker] provides a rich, detailed account of how western thinkers have understood the origins and development of the alphabet. . . . Millions learn the alphabet in childhood, and Drucker's study opens up a fascinating realm of ideas and scholarship into its origins and meaning."