http://www.tower.com/pantographia-containing-accurate-copies-all-known-a...

Or perhaps you were thinking of something more recent? :-)

The Fry book is cool, but the Armenian stuff at least is pretty freaky, so I have to suspect the rest too.

More recent: A. Nakanishi's accessible "Writing systems of the world" (1980), and the duly famous "The World's Writing Systems" by Daniels & Bright (1996).

hhp

The Fry book is nice, but I was thinking of something with fewer alphabets made out of people :)

The World’s Writing Systems is overly academic and doesn’t even bother showing examples of national and linguistic variations of some scripts. Nor does it really show much in the way of variation of Latin and Cyrillic scripts. If you’re looking for a basic showing of a full alphabet for alphabetic languages, you won’t find it.

It’s way, way overlong and much too expensive, especially considering it does not meet the use case Dunwich has proposed.

Good points, but those two books together will provide anybody
with much more insight than they had before. They did for me!

Now, an encyclopedia of writing systems? Go for it.

hhp

I am lucky to own a copy of “Alphabete des Morgen- und des Abendlandes” which was issued by the German Reichsdruckerei in 1927. Surely it is not exhaustive but it covers an admirable range of alphabets both ancient and modern – all (!) set in lead type. It also contains brief references to treatises on language and orthographies respectively.

Another source I found quite useful is a similar book by Carl Faulmann which has been reprinted and seems to be easily to obtain.

And there is a compendium of lead type alphabets (both ancient and modern languages) from the stock of the French Imprimerie Royal (from the 1990ties).

Oh, thanks for reminding me about the Imprimerie book!
It's wonderful, but only shows what they [used to] own.
There's also one they produced in 1905 - very nice too.

Faulmann... rings a bell. I might have checked it out
once from UCLA, but can't remember what it was like.
If it was good, I have copies in the garage. :-)

hhp

In terms of what James is seeking, the Faulmann book is probably the closest thing, although I would try to cross-check the information for any specific script with another source. It was compiled in 1880, so some of the information may be out-of-date and, of course, it misses all the languages that adopted or had imposed Cyrillic or Latin alphabets during the 20th Century.

Is the Faulmann book Das Buch Der Schrift by Karl Faulmann? It's a start, but not anywhere near as comprehensive as the databases. Or should I be looking for Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und Völker?

I'm starting to remember that the Faulmann book takes a lot from Fry?

hhp

Das Buch Der Schrift and Fry have a lot of similar content. I'm not sure if Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und Völker is the same book or not; I think it's probably an 1880 reprint of the 1878 Das Buch Der Schrift. I may just sift through all of the Latin languages on Omniglot and make a spreadsheet of the alphabet for each, which I could combine with a python script to check language support from an list of characters.

This is a typical example where it would be wonderful to have some sort of “build your own book” type of service (another one could be, for example, travel guides): I go to a reference site, select the features I’m interested in, then I can have them printed into a physical book(let) through a print-on-demand service such as Lulu and the like.

There is a book or two that fits that description.

The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets is one short one of which I have a copy.

I encountered the book by Nakanishi that Hrant mentioned in searching for data about that one. I think there's also a book by the GPO in the United States - and an old book by the Vatican that's on Google Books, but it'll take me a little while to get that information.

"books that describe languages and include an alphabet of the language?"

I don't have the answer because I am looking for a book format compendium of writing systems too, but you might like "Writing Systems, A Linguistic Approach" by author Henry Rogers, 2005, published by Blackwell. The focus is mostly on the writing systems and how they are used, rather than languages. It is not very comprehensive for tables of all writing systems though.

Have you seen www.ancientscripts.com?

John is more than right in recommending the old volumes getting viewed at with care. A lot of change happens in about Hundred years …
Nevertheless, even the old books like Faulmann provide plenty of useful and – mostly – reliable information since their making was closely related to typographic practice. On the other hand, when linguists handle the matter of writing systems and alphabets this can bear pitfalls for the graphic practitioner.
In the Faulmann one finds also some really rare information about off-the-beaten-track alphabets, e.g for Cyrillic in Romania or past Albanian alphabets.

Andreas: On the other hand, when linguists handle the matter of writing systems and alphabets this can bear pitfalls for the graphic practitioner.

Yes, and this is the principal problem with The World’s Writing Systems from the perspective of a type designer or a typographer. The information it contains is not the information that is useful to us. I still admire its attempt to make a standard approach to the description of writing systems, given that most linguists barely register written language at all.

… that most linguists barely register written language at all.

well put, John. Let alone they ever realise that notation systems is a science of its own ;-)

And in some cases, most specifically Chinese (when written in the traditional style), and to some extent Arabic as well, the written form should properly be considered as a language in its own right, since the written language, instead of being a transcription of current spoken language, is the transcription of an older more unified form of the spoken language.

Thanks for recommending the Routledge books, David. I will take a look at them.

given that most linguists barely register written language at all

That's a rather large brush you're painting with. As an Indo-Europeanist, I can assure you that I read texts in the original scripts (I had nightmares that I had to write my exams in cuneiform), learning quite a bit of epigraphy and paleography (which I consider to be parts of linguistic science) along the way.

Of course, if you restrict your definition of linguist to generative syntacticians and phonologists, you're good to go.

Just a few snapshots of the Reichsdruckerei volume:
.

What a marvelous piece of typography, worthy of the subject!

I am wandering off topic, but the complications of Chinese make generalizing difficult. For example, many of the "modern" simplified forms are just short-hand versions common for centuries -- some probably pre-date movable type. Certainly classical Chinese is very different from modern (as Latin is from English), but modern dialects can be transcribed as easily with traditional characters as simplified -- the People's Republic expanded their early computer character set ("Guobiao") largely by folding in the Taiwanese standard ("Big-5," all traditional).

Some advocate moving Chinese to an alphabetic script to avoid the time spent learning and typing thousands of characters. The first objection is always that written characters serve as a bridge between modern dialects that otherwise seem mutually unintelligible (such as Cantonese vs. "Mandarin"). Even within the most common dialect (普通话 or "ordinary speech") characters offer the surest way to distinguish among the many homophones; in conversation, it is not unusual for one party to "write" a character with a finger on his or her palm to clarify meaning. (In modern American English, the meaning of "POS" may or may not be clear: possibilities include "point of sale," "parent over shoulder," and "piece of sh*t"; sometimes the meaning is clear from the context, sometimes you need to spell it out.)

The consequences of technology for "written" Chinese are staggering. Before computers, typewriters were simply too complex for ordinary use. But, with text messaging cheaper than voice, China passed a billion messages per day years ago, when cell-phone screens and keypads were tiny. Now smart phones let you input characters by drawing them on-screen.

In modern Chinese, there is overlap between speech and writing, and between hand-written forms and typed.

David