From the simple representative shapes used to record transactions of goods and services in ancient Mesopotamia, to the sophisticated typographical resources available to the twenty-first-century users of desktop computers, the story of writing is the story of human civilization itself.

Calligraphy expert Ewan Clayton traces the history of an invention which—ever since our ancestors made the transition from a nomadic to an agrarian way of life in the eighth century BC—has been the method of codification and dissemination of ideas in every field of human endeavour, and a motor of cultural, scientific and political progress. He explores the social and cultural impact of, among other stages, the invention of the alphabet; the replacement of the papyrus scroll with the codex in the late Roman period; the perfecting of printing using moveable type in the fifteenth century and the ensuing spread of literacy; the industrialization of printing during the Industrial Revolution; the impact of artistic Modernism on the written word in the early twentieth century—and of the digital switchover at the century’s close.

从古代美索不达米亚用于记录商品和服务交易的简单代表形状，到二十一世纪台式电脑用户可利用的复杂的排版资源，书写的故事就是人类文明本身的故事。

书法专家伊万-克莱顿追溯了这一发明的历史，自从我们的祖先在公元前八世纪从游牧生活方式过渡到农业生活方式以来，它一直是人类各个领域编纂和传播思想的方法，是文化、科学和政治进步的动力。他探讨了以下几个阶段的社会和文化影响：字母的发明；罗马晚期用手抄本取代纸莎草卷；15世纪使用可移动字体的印刷术的完善以及随之而来的识字率的传播；工业革命期间印刷业的工业化；20世纪初艺术现代主义对文字的影响以及世纪末的数字转换。