The Golden Thread: the Story of Writing, by Ewan Clayton, review As a child, I had mixed feelings about Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Adults were fond of reading them aloud, with embarrassing dramatic expression; and I didn't care for being addressed as "Best Beloved" by an unknown author. But once I persuaded the grown-ups to hand over the book, I was fascinated by a pair of stories about a Neolithic girl who wrote the first letter, and invented the first alphabet. Half a century after I first read those stories, it is intriguing to discover Ewan Clayton, the calligrapher, former monk, erstwhile consultant to Xerox and professor in design at the University of Sunderland, recalling a more bruising experience, when he burst into tears as a six-year-old, having been told that he was writing his letter "f" wrongly. Clayton's childhood fascination with lettering lead him to the Sussex workshop of Joseph Cribb, the first apprentice of the sculptor and letter-cutter Eric Gill. Later he trained as a calligrapher, before putting his knowledge of scripts to work for Xerox. His experience of communicating via the written word thus spans the arc of writing technology, from stonecutting to manuscript to digital, and he brings his craftsman's perspective to his history of the Roman alphabet from its start to the present. The origins of the alphabet were not the inspiration of a lively minded Neolithic girl, but are to be found on a graffiti-covered cliff face near Wadi el-Hol in Upper Egypt. These ancient inscriptions represent the seeds from which alphabetic writing sprang, broadcast across the globe by merchants, armies and their bureaucrats and scribes, many of whom would have been slaves. Ancient attitudes to literacy, he observes, are at variance with those of modernity, where literacy is seen as power and freedom. In ancient Greece, the act of reading was seen as a kind of possession by the text; the loss of autonomy involved in allowing one's spirit to be inhabited by an unknown writer meant that reading was viewed with suspicion - an activity unsuitable for free citizens and grown men. Clayton's book is punctuated with such illuminating details. At every turn he brings his history alive by personifying it: the pleasure of writing on wax with a stylus is exemplified by the fine, flowing hand of a Roman scribe who made out the birth certificate of Herennia Gemella, born March 128 AD. The shift from scroll to book form is noted in a bit of advertising doggerel from 85-6 AD by the poet Martial, who remarks that his books, together with those of Virgil, Ovid, Cicero and Livy are now available in the new, hi-tech form of bound parchment leaves. Clayton's description of the rapture of early medieval monks as they engaged with the text of the Psalter draws on his own monastic experience of "words remembered because of the season they are chanted in, or because they are sung at the point in the year as the rising sun streams through a particular window of the church, or during the frost... or when the swallows are preparing to leave." He is adept at making inspired connections across the centuries of human fascination with text, describing how a savage passage of 14th-century invective about the text-obsessed nerdiness of the Florentine bibliophile and friend of Petrarch, Niccolò Niccoli, caused laughter when he read it aloud to the scientists at Xerox in the late Eighties: they all recognised themselves in the unflattering description of a character maddeningly obsessed with precision and detail. The charm of Clayton's book lies in the multitudinousness of its subject; the intricate blend of technology and sensibility that accompanies all text, whether handwritten, printed or (he persuasively argues) electronic. Though his account of written communication over the past 5,000 years necessarily has a powerful forward momentum, his diversions down the fascinating byways of the subject are irresistible: at what point did handwriting begin to express individual personality? When did authors gain a legal right to their own text? When did the goose quill become obsolete as a writing instrument? This is not, however, a mere salmagundi of alphabetical arcana. Clayton's passion for "the golden thread of written communication" is based on sturdy scholarship. If you want to know who gave uncial script its name, or what Thomas Aquinas's handwriting looked like ("lovely but appalling"), he can tell you. His book is an ideal place from which to begin an exploration of that most sophisticated of technologies - writing. A shame his publishers couldn't have included colour illustrations of the texts of which he gives such tantalising descriptions. The Golden Thread: the Story of Writing, by Ewan Clayton 416pp, Atlantic, Telegraph offer price: £23 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £25, ebook £9.59)