Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination

This book on the history of the alphabet is focused on Western and Semitic scripts; it pays little heed to the alphabetic scripts of South Asia. This book seems more concerned with mystical and artistic elaborations of the alphabetic symbols than with its actual use as a writing system. It focuses on things like the Kabbalah, calligraphic styles, and the changes wrought on attitudes to the alphabet wrought by the invention of printing. Parts of it seem a history of concepts used by other scholars attempting to determine the history and origin of the alphabet, rather than a new contribution to the alphabet's history.

Those who wish a more sober account of the alphabet's history, and tracing the family tree of the various alphabetic scripts, will get more mileage out of David Diringer's -The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind-. The information presented in this book, however, is interesting, if only for the fanciful ideas various people have devised around the alphabet.

My copy seems to have a number of typographical errors and other mistakes in it. A long passage discusses the thought of "Marcos the Gnostic." From the context I am reasonably certain that Marcion, not "Marcos," was intended. The people of Mount Seir in the Bible are identified in the book with Kenites and Midianites; if my memory serves me, the inhabitants of Mount Seir were Edomites and Horites. These mistakes tend to make me less inclined to trust the many passages that present data that is entirely new to me.

This book presents so much information, but does it in such a way, that I could not put this book down, with the exception to absorb what I had just read.

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in not only the genesis of the alphabet and it's morphology, but of other symbols as well, including alchemy symbols.

A reader reviewed this book by Joanna Drucker as not being enough informative on the alphabet history in itself. It's unfair and not informate to review the book like this. Its manifesto is all in the evocative title: The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination. Joanna Drucker traced an history of the alphabet from the very beginning talking about the interesting and often left apart complex variety of meanings of the letterform, embodied by mystery, symbolic, alchemic, religious, esotheric and many other values, offering an unique showcase of the history of writing. Saying the book is unsatisfying equals to say you have not even read the title, which explains quite well its content!

Going against the flow of reviews here, I found this book disappointing.

For a book of this scope, it is woefully short and lacking meaty details.

It rather ends up giving more space to the subjects of mysticism and the like, than to actual discourse on historical writing systems.

For instance, the "section" on runic languages is effectively two pages long, and half of those pages are taken up with diagrams; while parts of entire, multiple chapters are dedicated to illustrating calligraphic styles thru the ages. Fascinating on its, but perhaps better studied in a different volume.

Johanna Drucker gives us a comprehensive history of the alphabet, or should I say alphabets. She tells us about everything from the history of type face, to groups using various alphabets to justify their existence as a nation. Drucker also examines the various ways individuals have interpreted the alphabet; as a divine gift from a higher being to a necessary creation of "civilized" governments. This book was a fantastic read, although some sections required more than one reading for complete comprehension. A very informative book.