My collaborator and friend Maung Nyeu found a book of Marma proverbs (he himself is of the Marma people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh) and sent me a scan of one page. This is one of my favorites. It reads: “The body of a frog, but the voice of an ox. Small […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
For the past couple of months, Charles Riley at Yale has been sending me proverbs in (mostly) endangered alphabets from West Africa. I’m hoping to set up a proper gallery for them shortly, including translations, but I couldn’t resist posting some hasty cell-phone pictures before driving down to Connecticut tomorrow. The wood is just that […]
Struck by an idea–and the almost incurable itch to carve endangered scripts into pieces of beautiful wood–I have invented the Endangered Trivet. Intended to keep food and drink stains off our beautiful cherry table, it’s made of mahogany, and I glued a piece of green pool-table-style felt (what in England is called baize) on the […]
One of the most stunning woods in the world is paduak (pronounced pa-duke, at least in Vermont, and confusingly spelled “padauk” as often as not), an exotic tropical hardwood from central and West Africa and Southeast Asia. In its raw, sanded form it’s a brilliant tigerish orange striped with gold and darker reds and browns. […]
