Writing Systems

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just came across a really interesting book: _The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Writing Systems_ by Florian Coulmas (ISBN 0-631-21481-X
in paperback). It covers some 400 writing systems in detail. A random
sample includes:
    Easter Island script, Kalmyk, Javanese, Kpelle, Syriac, Old
Maldivian, various systems of runes, the Shavian alphabet, Nabataean,
etc. It also includes a reproduction of the Phaistos disc.

Also interesting for people looking for VMS script look-alikes is Akira
Nakanishi's _Writing Systems of the World_. (ISBN 0-8048-1654-9). While
not as extensive or detailed as the Coulmas book, it does contain a lot
of interesting scripts as well as photos of newspapers in many of the
languages.

Bruce Grant