If I’d had any kind of artistic training, of course, I would have learned this truth back in tenth grade, I suppose. Instead, I’m learning it now, and learning it literally from every angle: it’s all about light. When I’ve already carved the text, I have to have low light falling across the wood so […]
One of the great delights of this project is being sent a script I’ve been trying to track down for years. One of the greater delights is being sent a script I didn’t even know existed. A month or so ago I got an email from Tazim Kassam, who teaches at Syracuse University. He […]
After their brief but memorable appearance in Cambridge, the Alphabets rose before dawn and took a taxi to Stansted Airport, where despite a savage attack by Ryanair’s excess baggage fee policy, they cruised down to sunny Barcelona and the Tenth International Conference on the Book. Admittedly, the Alphabets were coming at books and publishing from […]
When I started the Endangered Alphabets Project, I hoped it would take me to many strange places and lead to many unusual experiences. Eating squirrel was not on my list. Nor was Iceland. My flight paused at Keflavik, the island capital’s airport, and I was looking forward to seeing, if only from the air on […]
The Alphabets Lite edition in its London bus-themed wheely-case left Vermont last Sunday, June 24th. The plan was to take a couple of days in Boston so my daughter Maddy could visit some prospective colleges and art schools, and then the Alphas and I’d take off from Logan Airport on the evening of Wednesday […]
The Alphabets have had an amazing week and a half: their first European tour. Many adventures to tell, but the first challenge was simply getting them there. To ship the original exhibition in its trunk would have cost nearly $1,000 each way, so I created The Alphabets Lite: twelve slightly smaller carvings in curly maple, […]
Let’s face it, even the name sounds like a genus of dinosaur: Glagolyticus paleographus. In fact, showing my usual oceanic ignorance, I didn’t even include the Glagolitic script in the original Endangered Alphabets exhibition because I thought it was extinct. All this changed because of an intervention from a most unlikely source: Will Shortz, the […]
Time for a little light-hearted break, I think. When I first went on Omniglot.com, I was struck by so many things, among them the number of languages I’d never heard of, and the number of languages that either seemed to have been made up recently for intellectual amusement or seemed to be altogether fictitious. So […]
If you are wearing shoes, Step on thorns and open A path for your children and grandchildren. –Advice from Ahiqar, sage and advisor to the Assyrian king Sennacherib, to his nephew. A month ago, George Bet-Shlimon sent me four text fragments from his personal library of Assyrian documents, written out by hand in the Syriac […]
Just thought you might like to see another carving, and yet another glimpse into the high-tech operation that is the Endangered Alphabets. This sign is a present for the poet John Balaban, renowned for his translations of Vietnamese poetry. He is also one of the founders of the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation, “founded in 1999 […]
