My new book By Hand is already prompting such fascinating discussions–the term “crusade” has been bandied about–that I’ve decided to launch the By Hand Book Club (BHBC). It will build on the amazing success of the online Writing Beyond Writing Book Club, which arose out of the launch of Writing Beyond Writing and continued on […]
My new book By Hand explores the importance and benefits of writing by hand, especially in an age of digital tools and AI. To celebrate the art of handwriting, I’m holding a contest in which three winners—from any country in the world, whatever language they speak and whatever alphabet they use–will receive free copies of […]
It is remarkable how many of the roughly 300 scripts in use around the world have been created in response to dreams—at least 20. In some instances the dream involved a divine command to create a script for the dreamer’s community; in some cases it included actual shapes to be used as letters; in some […]
I am creating a global network of Script Keepers–that is, people all over the world who care about script preservation and revival. I’ve been studying and trying to promote indigenous and minority writing systems for 16 years, and yet when I say “Endangered Alphabets” most people just look blank and confused. There is little interest in or funding […]
There is very little recognition, let alone praise, for people who are working to revive their traditional or emerging scripts. An endangered or emerging alphabet is almost always a symptom of a marginalized or suppressed community—a group of people who are routinely dismissed or discriminated against by their neighbors and, often, by the regional or […]
As part of our World Endangered Writing Day 2025 celebration of calligraphy in minority scripts, we’ve compiled–well, Alana Brown did most of the work–this set of recommendations, mostly on Instagram, where you can see some of the rich profusion of the work being done to sustain minority writing through art. Reminder: you can register […]
On Monday morning (that is, September 9), I had an adventure beyond a geek’s wildest dreams. In Cambridge for a couple of weeks to do endangered alphabets research, I went to the Cambridge University Library and, casting around for somewhere to start, I asked Frank in the Manuscripts Reading Room for a couple of books […]
Nowadays, we think of writing as something that appears on paper, or a screen (or a billboard), and something we read/consume individually, but this is a very recent idea. Venture back a few centuries, or out among the endangered alphabets, and writing is part of a performance–such a fascinating difference that it’s the subject of […]
A surprising (to me) number of people still wonder why someone would go to all the trouble of inventing a new script for their language when, as they see it, the world seems to have enough perfectly good ones going around. Let’s hear the answer, or some of the answers, from the source. A guest […]
I’m planning my usual annual Kickstarter campaign in October, but in the meantime a cause has come to my attention that I want to support, if at all possible, with a mini- campaign right now. A couple of months ago I ran a global contest for handwriting in a minority or indigenous script, and one […]
