The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems

Of all the many books like this, and I've seen and owned most of them, this is one of the best. The best I've encountered is Hans Jensen's "Sign, Symbol and Script."
This one is good for getting a quick and brief description of many script systems, but Jensen's will give you the most detail that I've ever encountered of any alphabet.

This book illustrates several quite interesting scripts that are barely mentioned in the much more expensive Daniels & Bright, such as the Wolof, Yup'ik, and Nu shu scripts. For all its expense, Daniels & Bright has some poorly written sections, but at least the illustrations are (for the most part) clear. However, as the previous reviewer said, many of the illustrations in the Blackwell Encyclopedia are clipped and pasted and of poor quality. For example, the table illustrating the Yup'ik script has explanatory headings in handwritten cursive German, with letters so small that I can't make them out, and the system is not described in anywhere in the text. So, even if I could distinguish the Yup'ik letters (many of which I can't), I wouldn't know what many of them represented.

That said, this is one of the better books for its price.

After reading previous reviews, I was excited about flipping through my own copy of the encyclopedia; however, I quickly became disappointed. For all the work and study that went into the production of the book, there is no doubt to its value to the linguistic community; however, keep the following points in mind: 1) the entry on the Anglo Saxon alphabet contradicts itself (identifying 25 letters in the text, but showing a different set of 25 letters, demonstrating 26 in total). 2) The entry on the misnamed "Mormon Alphabet" is appalling--those who used it over a century ago called it the Deseret Alphabet; and it's creation was commissioned by Brigham Young in the 1840s--it was not reveled to Joseph Smith on Gold Plates in the 1830; to claim such shows marked assumptions of the author based solely on previously-known knowledge of the sect.

Furthermore, the Figures and table are of photocopies quality, some of the characters so small that distinction between them cannot be easily recognized. Nor do the tables of alphabets line up with their entries. Nor are the tables uniform, but seem to be cut-and-paste tables from other sources.

The text has value, but some of the scholarship is dubious, and the graphic presentation is shambles.

This book is a great starting place for people who are interesting in the many ways people have encoded language by means of writing. The descriptions of most systems are complete enough that one can get a real feel for how they work (if not perhaps all the details of the most complex systems). It also includes brief articles on topics such as calligraphy, the status of alphabetic writing versus other systems, and the like. While some of these are subjects of heated scholarly debate, Coulmas provides balanced explanations of the issues.A wonderful overview of the intricate and beautiful ways people write the world over.Other books that would interest readers of this are:"The World's Writing Systems" from Oxford University Press is the best single reference for complete descriptions of scripts. But at nearly [$$$] in hardcover, it's relatively inaccessible to the general reader. It's also targeted to a more professional audience and is not as good for browsing around. As an anthology of articles by experts it is both more authoritative, and a bit more uneven than Coulmas."Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction" by Geoffrey Sampsonis more of a discussion of the issues raised for linguistics by a variety of writing systems. Sampson's book includes a detailed discussion of the Chinese system.

This is the only book that I have yet found that compares to David Diringer's -The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind-.

It is not quite so complete in its coverage of obscure scripts as Diringer, and it makes far fewer attempts to analyse the history of the scripts. On the other hand, because it covers less such territory, the exemplars of the scripts and the tables of the characters and their values in this book are far more legible. The alphabetic arrangement of the material makes it easy to find which system you want.

Another of this book's strengths is that at least some attempt is made to explain how the phonemes of the many languages are expressed by the scripts in question; in many languages, from Tibetan to English, the relationship between alphabet and speech is subtle and complex. Obviously, this information will be cursory and incomplete, but having some is better than having none, and it is at least handy to know whether you are dealing with phonemic or with etymological spellings. This will help you not only to transliterate, but also to read, them.

If you are fascinated by the history of writing, and obscure scripts and arcane alphabets, you NEED this book, and will spend hours leafing through it.