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The Golden Thread, The Story of Writing

This work develops Clayton’s research into how we can give today’s debates around the role of the written word and handwriting a sense of grounding in historical material and social culture beyond that circumscribed by the communities interested in ‘the history of the book’ or a ‘style history of letterforms.’ Clayton investigates how writing survived the collapse of classical antiquity into the high middle ages, how despite the invention of printing in the fifteenth century handwriting was crucial to the institutional and intellectual development of the enlightenment and how it was affected by the romantic movement and then the industrial revolution.

Clayton explores how artists in the 20th Century made substantial contributions to the physical representation of the written word and how at the end of the twentieth century the computer became transformed from a calculating device into a new technology for communication: a new writing tool in succession to the quill pen, the typewriter and the printing press. Clayton also poses questions about the nature of literacy and the role material artefacts have played in the long human search to transform information into more lasting embodied wisdom. Though extensively footnoted the text is deliberately written in the genre of popular scholarship because the author’s aim is to contribute to shifting our cultural understanding of handwriting, particularly amongst the many who use new communication technologies, helping us understand their limitations as well as their possibilities.