Anne Trubek’s account The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting is more than the title suggests. That alone could make do with a modest pamphlet. Instead, the book is a history of all writing and printing, internet included. Even so, it is terse enough for a brief but absorbing volume.

Writing, and with it history, begins at Sumer (today’s southern Iraq), some 5,000 years B.C. This was cuneiform, i.e., wedge-shaped incisions of varying depth on small clay tablets serving legal or business purposes, signed by intaglio from small stone cylinders worn around the neck.

Much later came the Egyptians, writing on papyrus made from plants in hieroglyphs, arguably the most beautiful form of writing ever devised. Also, however, very difficult and slow to be learned. Thus it was limited to an aristocratic elite, or specially trained, expensive scribes, although some simpler forms of writing also existed.

By the time of the Greeks, vellum, made from animal skins, supplanted the inferior, plant-derived papyrus. So too the invented calamus was a better implement than the previous stylus. But the Greeks, exemplified by Socrates, who inveighed against it as inferior to oratory, rarely put anything into writing—barely more than did other such totally nonwriting illuminati as Buddha, Moses, and Jesus. Even Aristotle conceded only that letters were “invented so that we might be able to converse with the absent.” Homer’s memorized epics had to wait for centuries to be committed to writing. Something like that prevailed also in