Inventing the Alphabet – (+.+) & <*

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Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

book
2024
offset lithograph, hardcover with bellyband
175 x 240 mm, 424 pp

Inventing the Alphabet covers the long history of debates about the origins of the alphabet, which have been raging for more than 2,500 years. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Ducker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric ref-erences, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.

Beginning with biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin as well as discussions of how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alphanumeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the modern fields of archaeology and paleography.

This is the first book to chronicle the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of study. (From the flap of the English edition)

Being responsible for the words as well as the looks of the book, we took a restrained approach to the design. Throughout the 424 pages, we used our recent favorite Korean typeface, Sandoll Jeongche. The inverted subheadings were inspired by the rubbed reproduction of inscriptions, a technique used in some of the archeological studies discussed in the book.

For the cover, we chose two (the A and the Z) of the eight alphabet-themed artworks created as chapter openers by designer Rae Ganci Hammers for the original edition. The remaining six images, now fewer in number, became section dividers. The color palette, including the black and red of the cover and the green of the bellyband, is related to the current political situation of the region where the alphabet originated.