http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/08/palimpsest_a_history_of_the_written_world_by_matthew_battles_reviewed.html

More than a century and a half ago, newlyweds Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne scratched a love message to each other into the window of their cottage with Sophia’s diamond ring. “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes,” they etched into the pane. “April 3, 1843. In the Gold light.” Those were the days, writes Matthew Battles in his new book, Palimpsest: A History of the Written World, when “writing leapt beyond the page”—when letters were “carved in wood or punched and chased in silver, embroidered in tapestry and needlepoint, wrought in iron and worked into paintings, a world in which words [were] things.”