"Silvia Ferrara leads a code cracking mission to decipher the hidden truths and histories of our greatest invention-the art of writing"--

From the simple representative shapes used to record transactions of goods and animals in ancient Egypt, to the sophisticated typographical resources available to the twenty-first-century computer user, the story of writing is the story of human civilization itself. Ewan Clayton marks each step in the historical development of writing, and explores the social and cultural impact of every stage: the invention of the alphabet; the replacement of the...

"Witty, moving, informative, and inspiring, Signed, Sealed, Delivered begins with Nina Sankovitch's discovery of a trunk filled with a trove of hundred-year-old letters in an old house she has just bought with her husband. They are from a Princeton freshman to his mother. Sankovitch cannot help think of her own son, who is about to go off to Harvard, and of the letters she's kept and cherished from a beloved sister and from her husband. From there...

"The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks. We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionize our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative...