The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets

This slim volume contains 39 scripts (and their variants) along with their transliterations and brief histories. The scripts of most major languages are covered, as well as some key historical scripts such as Devanagari and Gothic. The scripts are arranged in alphabetical order to aid rapid lookup. The book would be an essential reference for a library as well as an interesting addition to the collection of anyone interested in languages or scripts.

George L. Campbell's "Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets" is a stripped-down guide to 40 writing systems from around the world. Alphabetically arranged from "Arabic" to "Tibetan," each entry contains a brief textual description of each writing system, along with a table in which each character is presented along with a transliteration into the Roman alphabet. The only departure from this format is for a non-phonetic system like Chinese.Because of this no-frills format, there is virtually no depiction of the writing systems as actually used; all we see are the individual characters arranged in grids. The only real illustration is a photograph of a manuscript written in Roman characters; other than that, the various characters are oddly lifeless on the page. It would have been nice to see some lines from a poem, or perhaps a clipping from a newspaper for each script.This drawback aside, "Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets" is an informative work. And, despite the rigid presentation of the various scripts, I find great variety and beauty in this gathering of iconic characters. The loops and curls of the Tamil script, the mathematical regularity of the Cree syllabary, the bold lines of the Batak script--all these and more are a pleasure to behold.