The Golden Thread

The Story of Writing

Ewan Clayton

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782390343
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Golden Thread is an enthralling and accessible history of the cultural miracle that is the written word. It is an invention that has been used to share ideas in every field of human endeavour, and a motor of cultural, scientific and political progress.

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 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.

The Golden Thread raises issues of urgent interest for a society living in an era of unprecedented change to the tools and technologies of written communication. Chief amongst these is the fundamental question: 'What does it mean to be literate in the world of the early twenty-first century?' The Golden Thread belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who is inquisitive not just about the centrality of writing in the history of humanity, but also about its future.

Contents

		Introduction
1		Roman Foundations
2		The Convenience of the Codex
3		Speaking through the Senses
4		The New World: Script and Print
5		Turning the Page: Reformation and Renewal
6		Handwriting Returns
7		Putting the World of the Written Word in Order
8		The Coming of Industry
9		The Industrial Age
10		Revolutions – in Art and Print
11		Alternative Dreams
12		The Material Artefact
		Notes
		Bibliography
		Acknowledgments
		List of Illustrations
		Index

Fig. 2. Roman handwriting with reed pen on papyrus scroll fragment. An extract from Cicero’s speech In Verram, first half of 1st century CE.

Introduction

We are at one of those turning points, for the written word, that come only rarely in human history. We are witnessing the introduction of new writing tools and media. It has only happened twice before as far as the Roman alphabet is concerned – once in a process that was several centuries long when papyrus scrolls gave way to vellum books in late antiquity, and again when Gutenberg invented printing using movable type and change swept over Europe in the course of just one generation, during the late fifteenth century. Changing times now mean that for a brief period many of the conventions that surround the written word appear fluid; we are free to re-imagine the quality of the relationship we will make with writing, and shape new technologies. How will our choices be informed – how much do we know about the medium’s past? What work does writing do for us? What writing tools do we need? Perhaps the first step towards answering these questions is to learn something of how writing got to be the way it is.

My own involvement with these questions began when I was twelve years old and I was put back into the most junior class of the school to relearn how to write. I had been taught three different styles of handwriting in my first four years of schooling and as a result I was hopelessly confused about what shapes letters ought to be. I can still remember bursting into tears aged six when I was told my print script f was ‘wrong’ – in this class f had lots of loops, and I simply could not understand why.

Being back in the bottom class was ignominious. But my family and family friends gave me books on writing well. My mother gave me a calligraphy pen set. My grandmother lent me a biography to read: a life of Edward Johnston, a man who lived in the village where I had my early schooling. He was the person who had revived an interest in the lost art of calligraphy in the English-speaking world at the beginning of the twentieth century. It turned out that my grandmother knew him, she used to go Scottish country dancing with Mrs Johnston, and my godmother, Joy Sinden, had been one of Mr Johnston’s nurses. ‘Tell me,’ he had said to her in the dark watches of one night, in his slow, deliberate, sonorous voice, ‘What would happen if you planted a rose in a desert? … I say try it and see.’

Johnston developed the typeface that London Transport uses to this day. I was soon hooked on pens and ink and letter-shapes and so began a lifelong quest to discover more about writing.

Several other experiences enriched this quest. My grandparents lived in a community of craftspeople near Ditchling in Sussex, founded in the 1920s by the sculptor and letter-cutter Eric Gill. Next door to my grandfather’s weaving shed was the workshop of Joseph Cribb, who had been Eric’s first apprentice. On days off from school I was allowed to go into Joseph’s workshop, where he showed me how to use a chisel and carve zigzag patterns into blocks of white limestone. He also showed me how to cut the V-shaped incisions that carved letters are made from. I acquired a sense of where letters had begun. Then, after leaving university, I trained as a calligrapher and bookbinder and went on to earn my living in the craft. It meant I learned to cut a quill pen, to prepare parchment and vellum for writing and to make books out of a stack of smooth paper, boards and glue, needle and thread.

In my twenties, after a serious illness, I decided to enter a monastery. I lived there for four years, first as a layman and then as a monk. I thought it would mean turning my back on calligraphy for ever, but I was wrong. The Abbot, Victor Farwell, had a favourite sister, Ursula, who had once been the secretary of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, to which I belonged. She saw my name on the list of monks and said to her brother, ‘You must let him practise his craft.’ So like a scribe in days of old, I became a twentieth-century monastic calligrapher. But I learned something else there also. When many hours of the day are spent in silence, words come to have a new power. I learned to listen and read in new ways.

Finally, when I left the monastery in the late 1980s, there was one more unusual experience awaiting me. I was hired as a consultant to Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center of the Xerox Corporation in California. This was the lab that invented the networked personal computer, the concept of Windows, the Ethernet and laser printer and much of the basic technology that lies behind our current information revolution. It is where Steve Jobs first saw the graphical user interface which gave the look and feel to the products from Apple that we have all come to know so well. So when Xerox PARC wanted an expert on the craft of writing to sit alongside their scientists as they built the brave new digital world we now all live in – somehow I became that person. It was a life-changing experience and transformed my view of what writing is.

Crucial to this experience was David Levy, a computer scientist whom I had met while he was taking time out to study calligraphy in London. It was he who invited me out to PARC and from whom I learned the essential perspectives that have shaped this history.¹ So I think it is to PARC and to David Levy in particular that I owe a debt of gratitude for bringing me to write this story.

So far my experience of what it means to be literate has been one of contrasts, from monastery to high-tech research centre, quill pen and bound books to email and the digital future. But throughout my journey I have found it important to hold past, present and future in a creative tension, neither to be too nostalgic about the way things were nor too hyped-up about the digital as the answer to everything – salvation by technology. I see everything that is happening now – the web, mobile computing, email, new digital media – as in continuity with the past. There are two things of which we can be certain: first, not every previous writing technology will disappear in years to come, and second, new technologies will continue to come along – every generation has to rethink what it means to be literate in their own times.

In fact our education in writing seems never to cease. My father, who is over eighty years old, has written a letter to his six children every Monday for the last forty-seven years. In that time his ‘My Dears’ have migrated from fountain pen on small sheets of headed notepaper, to biro and felt-tip; and then in the mid-seventies he taught himself to type, using carbon paper to make copies which were typed on A4 sized sheets. The next step was to use a photocopier for copying his originals and today he has bought a Mac and the letters are emailed, each of my brother and sisters’ addresses carefully pasted into the ‘cc’ box in his mail application. He is learning a new language of fonts and leading, control clicks, right clicks, modems and wi-fi. Last birthday we bought him a digital camera, and his letters now contain images and short movies.

The book in your hands has come about because I wanted to piece together a history of writing using the Roman alphabet that draws all the various disciplines surrounding it together, though fundamentally my perspective is that of a calligrapher. Knowledge of writing is held in so many different places by experts on different cultures, by students of epigraphy (writing in stone) and palaeography (the study of ancient writing), calligraphers, typographers, lawyers, artists, designers, letter-carvers, sign-writers, forensic scientists, biographers and many more besides. Indeed writing this book felt at times like an impossible task: it seemed that every decade and topic had its experts, and how could one possibly master 5,000 years’ worth of this? I have had to accept that I cannot, but I hope I can give you a taste of it, a broad sweep that might lead you to explore further aspects of the story for yourselves.

In some sense this book is a history of craftsmanship in relation to the written word. It seems perhaps an old-fashioned concept. But as I was writing this book, in October 2011, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, sadly died. That month also saw the release of his authorized biography. All the writers reviewing Jobs’s life and work agreed on one thing: he had a passion for craftsmanship and design, and it was this that had made all the difference for Apple, and for Jobs himself. Two perspectives seem to have been complementary to his sense of design. ‘You have got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology.’² And that great products are a triumph of taste and taste happens, said Jobs, ‘by exposing yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring the same things into what you are doing’.³

One of the significant experiences in confirming Jobs’s viewpoint, it turns out, had been his exposure to the history and practice of ‘writing’ whilst dropping out from a degree course at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was one of the few colleges in North America to hold calligraphy classes. When Jobs followed his heart and took up calligraphy he was introduced to a broad sweep of cultural history and fine craftsmanship in handwriting and typography that was a revelation to him. It complemented the perspective he learned from his adoptive father, who was a mechanical engineer, that craftsmanship mattered.

Steve Jobs was a technologist that got it, he knew the look and feel of things mattered; the way we interact with them was not just value added, it was part of their soul, it carried meaning, it enabled us to relate to and live with...