Is handwriting about to become a lost art in the United States? And if so, what exactly will we lose by writing exclusively with digital tools? These are the questions tackled by award-winning author Tim Brookes in his new book, By Hand — which is not so much a curmudgeon’s cry of “Bah, humbug!” as an adventure of wonder and delight that explores the pen, paper, human hand, and human mind.

As founder of the global Endangered Alphabets Project, Brookes noticed that most major European countries still respect and teach handwriting, and some minority cultures are actually using calligraphy as a way of reconnecting with their traditional languages, arts, and identity.

“I started wondering what they know that we don’t,” he said, “or that we are willfully forgetting.”

In researching for By Hand, he found plenty of examples, both far and near from home, of how the art of writing helps maintain community in ways that digital tools do not. But in order to fully understand how we benefit from the old-school relationship between writer, pen, and paper, he decided to do something almost unimaginably radical these days: He wrote almost all of By Hand by hand.

“I’ve always practiced immersive journalism,” reflected Brookes. He has written books about asthma as an asthmatic who suffered a near-fatal attack, about hitchhiking as a hitchhiker around America, and about the global campaign to eradicate polio by accompanying vaccination teams to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and rubbing shoulders with the Taliban. ”But this was the hardest thing I’ve done,” he said.

Ironically, four decades of working on a keyboard as a professional writer had ruined his handwriting.

“Every day I had to confront my own sense of shame — a shame that so many Americans feel. I couldn’t form a decent lower-case ‘g’ or an ‘s.’ My hand would try to jump off the page. I hated everything I wrote.”

Over several months, though, his hand became steadier, more graceful — and at the same time, he discovered the remarkable connections between the hand and the brain, and the almost miraculous (but well-documented) health benefits of keeping a journal.

“Now I take my journal and my calligraphy pen everywhere,” he said. “Nobody should leave home without them.”

Signed copies of By Hand are available on endangeredalphabets.com and will shortly go on sale on Amazon.