Ebook: The Hidden Language of Graphic Signs: Cryptic Writing and Meaningful Marks

This volume offers a full view of human resourcefulness. Spanning continents and millennia, it inquires into that zone between demonstrable historical connections and structural parallels — these contrasts may reveal as much as commonalities — between picture and text, between stand-alone signs and the social worlds and personal identities that enveloped them. Individuals made these marks, but communities sorted out their meaning and motivated their orderly use. Social or material transactions accompanied marked things, asserting what might pertain to whom. There is yearning too, be it a commitment to graphic economy and clarity or to a better world, and, at times, a sheer joy in cleverness and visual games, which only some are invited to play. Being material, these graphs are not just communicative. To some, they are. They exist; they exert talismanic power on their own. In final measure, as testaments to human ingenuity, they leave us in bemused wonder about what is to come.