In the nineteenth century, when an explorer returned to London or New York from distant lands, the tradition was to invite them to speak at the Royal Geographical Society or the Explorers Club, to report on their findings.
Tim Brookes has spent 13 years discovering the world’s fascinating indigenous and minority scripts and their cultures of origin.
He found scripts that have been banned and burned, script creators who have been assassinated, scripts consisting of geometrical patterns in sand, scripts used for divination and magic, scripts whose scribes abstained from sex before embarking on acts of writing or copying, and, perhaps most remarkable of all, a sacred Indian alphabet that is recited aloud as a religious ritual.
This book is the equivalent of his talk to the Explorers Club, and also the response to an imagined question from the imaginary audience: “What can we learn from your journey about writing itself?”
In response, he offers not only new perspectives but even new definitions of writing—and a new way of thinking about how our own beliefs about writing have affected the world, and not necessarily for the better.
Read an interview with Tim Brookes talking about Writing Beyond Writing.
NEW! Join the Writing Beyond Writing Book Club to discover and explore all kinds of new and unexpected insights into the nature of writing itself! Information and Signup HERE.
Download a free excerpt from Writing Beyond Writing [PDF]
Orders
Softcover edition
$29.95 plus shipping
Hardcover edition
(First printing sold out. Pre-orders only: anticipated delivery date January 23rd, 2024.)
$49.95 plus shipping
Ebook edition
$7.95
As the book includes a lot of non-Latin minority scripts, this edition is not compatible with commercial e-readers. But it will be perfect for reading as a PDF on PCs, laptops and phones.
Audiobook edition (pre-order: release date June 1, 2024)
$19.95
Book club edition
Minimum order of six softcover copies comes with a free one-hour Zoom conversation with the author
Classroom edition
Minimum order of ten softcover copies comes with a free one-hour Zoom conversation/discussion/lecture and a set of discussion questions
To request a review copy, email info@endangeredalphabets.com.
For foreign /translation rights and all other inquiries, email info@endangeredalphabets.com.
Reviews
Midwest Book Review
The outcome of a life’s work as a successful writer and a dozen years of researching the world’s indigenous and minority writing systems, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets by Tim Brookes is an entirely original exploration of writing itself.
As the world’s leading investigator of rare alphabets, Brookes examines the world’s fascinating and often stunning disappearing minority scripts and shows that writing can and often does have qualities we have forgotten — iconic qualities, community values, spiritual qualities, even magical qualities.
Brookes considers the ways in which we in the West have increasingly defined writing as something abstract, purely symbolic, merely a mechanical tool for representing the sounds of speech, and asks what is lost when writing is reduced to such a narrow and colorless definition.
Brookes also shows that just as many cultures around the world are reviving their embattled traditional alphabets, even in the West the old division between writing and art is being healed in surprising ways — and right under our noses!
A fascinating, informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking study that will have a particular and special value for readers with an interest in the history and evolution of the alphabet and written languages, as well as the cultural implications of diverse writing styles from antiquity down to the present day.
A bibliographer’s delight and unreservedly recommended for community and college/university History of Writing collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists, this large format hardcover edition of Tim Brookes seminal and ground-breaking work, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets from Percentage Possibility Publications is also readily available for students academia, and non-specialist general readers in a paperback edition.
