Writing

For thousands of years people all over the world have been writing things down. Writing allowed them to keep accounts of their belongings, to record their laws, their stories, and history. To begin with, simple pictures were used to stand for objects or convey ideas. Gradually these pictures evolved, leading to a variety of scripts and alphabets all over the world. With a series of specially commissioned photographs, many of the objects selected from the unrivalled collections of the British Library, Writing tells the story of these scripts and the different ways in which they are written. See the delicate brush strokes needed to build up a single Chinese character, and the quill pens and inks used by medieval monks as they laboriously hand-copied page after page of manuscript. Discover how book-making has changed since the invention of printing, and see how a modern book is bound by hand. Produced in association with the British Library, London, Writing is a unique and exciting introduction to written communication from its earliest beginnings to the present day.