Ewan Clayton, the calligrapher, former monk, erstwhile consultant to Xerox and professor in design at the University of Sunderland, recalling a more bruising experience, when he burst into tears as a six-year-old, having been told that he was writing his letter "f" wrongly. Clayton's childhood fascination with lettering lead him to the Sussex workshop of Joseph Cribb, the first apprentice of the sculptor and letter-cutter Eric Gill. Later he trained as a calligrapher, before putting his knowledge of scripts to work for Xerox. His experience of communicating via the written word thus spans the arc of writing technology, from stonecutting to manuscript to digital, and he brings his craftsman's perspective to his history of the Roman alphabet from its start to the present.
The origins of the alphabet were not the inspiration of a lively minded Neolithic girl, but are to be found on a graffiti-covered cliff face near Wadi el-Hol in Upper Egypt. These ancient inscriptions represent the seeds from which alphabetic writing sprang, broadcast across the globe by merchants, armies and their bureaucrats and scribes, many of whom would have been slaves.
