Can I read The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (Lettering, Calligraphy, Typography) on EtoBox?

The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (Lettering, Calligraphy, Typography) by David Diringer is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (Lettering, Calligraphy, Typography) about?

"A remarkable work. . . . For sheer weight of information there is no equal to it." — The Spectator. It is probable that the earliest "books" were written on wood or leaves as early as the fourth millennium B.C. These fragile materials, unfortunately, have not come down to us. In their absence, the earliest surviving books are the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, the oldest attributed to c. 3500 B.C. On these ancient clay shards, dense rows of cuneiform script record the seminal writings of mankind: the Gilgamesh epic, Sumerian literary catalogues, Babylonian astrology, Assyrian accounts of the Creation and the Flood, and the Lipit-Ishtar Law-Code (c. 2000 B.C.), predating Hammurabi and the oldest law code in human history. Probably as ancient as the Mesopotamian writings, or nearly so, are Egyptian hieroglyphics. In a sense, it is the papyrus scrolls of the Egyptians — preserved by that country's hot, dry climate — that represent the true ancestors of the modern book. As the centuries passed, papyrus slowly gave way to parchment (the prepared skins of animals) as writing material. Indeed, the handwritten parchment or vellum codex is "the book" par excellence of the Middle Ages. Weste

Who reads The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (Lettering, Calligraphy, Typography)?

Author

David Diringer

Publisher

Dover Publications, Incorporated

Published

2013

Language

EN

ISBN

9780486242439

Category

history

Subjects

Technology, Literary Fiction, Computer Science

Rating

3.62 / 5 (23 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14