A supplement (bekkan) to the Sanseido Encyclopaedia of Linguistics
(Japanese: Gengogaku Daijiten) has appeared under the title Sekai Moji
Jiten: (Scripts and Writing Systems of the World). It is a very dense, hefty
volume of 1222 pages. It treats historical and current scripts, in general
in much, much greater detail (and many more varieties; Nora script, anyone?)
than Bright & Daniels. A great strength is of course Asian scripts (India,
China, SE Asia), which tend to get short shift in general Western
publications. It's definitely a major work, combining the characteristics
of, but going beyond both books of the Bright & Daniels variety, and those
of the Dirringer/Jensen compendia kind.
Of course, the entries (which have bibliographies, many in Western
languages) are in Japanese; I don't think the numerous illustrations are
sufficient for a non-Japanese reader, even if headings have an English
equivalent. Moreover, it is very pricy: I just checked at Amazon Japan, and
the price quoted is Y48,000. Nevertheless, if you're serious about scripts
and know Japanese, you should check it out.
Martin Heijdra
Chinese Bibliographer
East Asian Library and the Gest Collection
Frist Campus Center, Room 317
Princeton University
33 Frist Campus Center
Princeton, NJ 08544 USA