A library is an attempt to gather together man's writings, and this effort was first made long before the birth of Christ.

Scientists who dug up Ur, the city of the patriarch Abraham, dis­covered a clay signet. This was a cylinder o...

Every year, when the Nobel Prizes are announced there is a great deal of publicity about the winners. They are interviewed and articles are written about them. This is because winning the Nobel Prize is consid­ered by most people the highest honor that can be achieve...

The first newspapers were nothing like our papers today. They were more like letters containing news. In the fifth century B.C., there were men in Rome who wrote these newsletters and sent them to people who lived far away from the capital.

Somet...

Today we don't think of a cartoon as being associated with great art, but at one time it was. During the period of the Italian Renaissance, the term "cartoon" meant the first sketch in actual size of a large work of art, such as a mural. When news­ papers ...

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just speak and write as you like, without having to learn the rules of grammar?

When you have something to express, you want to express it accu­rately, don't you? You don't want to be mis­understood. If everybody spoke and wr...

Suppose you and your friends wanted to set up a system of sending secret messages to each other. You might say, "Instead of using letters, let's use numbers." Each number will stand for a certain letter of the alphabet.

You would then have a code. Cry...

Can you write as fast as you can speak? Almost nobody can. But very often it is necessary to take down the words as someone speaks them in order to have a record. One way of doing this is writing in shorthand. Shorthand is the art of writing by means of signs that can...

The word "hieroglyphs" means "sacred carvings." Actually, it is not an accurate name for the ancient writing of the Egyptians. It came about because when the early Greeks first saw these writings, they believed they were made by priests for sacred purposes. <...

If you were unfortunate enough to be blind, one of the greatest losses you would feel would be not being able to read. Just think how impor­tant the ability to read books is to you. Well, people realized this a long time ago and tried to find methods for enabling ...

The history of man is full of cruelty towards those whose sickness we have been unable to understand. For thousands of years, for example, deaf-mutes were treated as if they were dangerous to society. In many countries they were regarded as idiots and were locked ...