WHERE DO OUR LETTERS COME FROM?
The Accountant, the King, the Priest, and the Poet
traces the extraordinary 5,000-year journey of the Latin alphabet-from the clay tablets of Sumer to the pages of modern design. Through twenty-six artifacts, Colleen Comerford explores how writing systems evolved, adapted, and spread across cultures, shaped by trade, religion, conquest, and creativity.
Blending design, history, and storytelling, this book offers students, educators, and curious readers a visually rich introduction to the roots of written communication. It offers a broad and concise historical overview of where, when, why, how, and by whom the alphabet developed. Intended especially for students of design, it provides historical context for design decisions and connects past letterforms to contemporary visual communication.
This is more than a history of letters-it is a tribute to the inventors, translators, and everyday people who shaped the most widely used alphabetic system in the world. By exploring how ancient ideas continue to influence the present, it invites readers to see the alphabet not just as a set of characters, but as a living legacy of human creativity.
Colleen Comerford earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied visual communication in Paris at the Parsons School of Design, and earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts. She has worked professionally as a graphic designer and illustrator. She has taught at the Mass College of Art + Design, Simmons University, and spent four years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, teaching at Dar Al Hekma University. She is the author of
ABCing: Seeing the Alphabet Differently
.