Wholesale Rulers of Literature

12" Wooden Ruler made in U.S.A. of American-grown basswood. This ruler celebrates great writing. It is heavily skewed toward Western authors, but we have made a few notable exceptions. The first writer is someone whose name we don’t know, but they wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian around 4000 years ago. Confucius (551-479 BC) lived and wrote in China. Six of the writers on our list are women: Murasaki Shikibu (c.978), Jane Austen (1775-1817), the sisters Charlotte (1816-1855) and Emily (1818-1848) Brontë, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), and Toni Morrison (1931-2019). The “head” image is of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the Bard of Avon, much of whose extraordinary output, including 39 plays and 154 sonnets, has been translated into every major living language, and who popularized an uncanny amount of English-language expressions that are still in use today.