Events
Endangered Alphabets: Beyond the Borders of Writing
with Tim Brookes
You’ve never seen writing like this. You may not even recognize it as writing. Your loss—and the world’s.
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For the past 16 years, Tim Brookes has been searching the world for the least-used and most marginalized forms of writing—and then advocating for them and their communities, carving them in beautiful woods, and asking questions like “Why would someone want to destroy an alphabet?” “What happens when a people can no longer use their script?” and the most deceptive of all, “What is writing, anyway?”
Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.
Tim Brookes
Tim Brookes was born in England and educated at Oxford before moving to the United States in 1980.
An editor, guitarist, teacher, soccer coach and author of 20 books and numerous articles and essays, he founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010 with his first exhibition of carvings in indigenous and minority scripts.
Since then he has exhibited and spoken about the Endangered Alphabets at more than 150 colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and galleries including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress, while working with a wide range of cultures to create games and educational materials for learning and promoting minority scripts.
His latest books are An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets and Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets. He is currently at work on By Hand: Endangered Alphabets, Calligraphy, and the Future of the Written Word.
He lives near the Canadian border on the shores of Lake Champlain.
