This study is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology. Traversing four millennia, Martin offers a chronicle of writing as a cultural system, a means of communication and a history of technologies. He shows how the written word originated, how it[...]

The emergence of the book was an event of world historical importance, and heralded the dawning of modernity. In this much praised history of that momentous process, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, with the study of mo[...]