An animal’s cry, poetry, medical symptoms, media messages, language disorders, architecture, marketing, body language – all are signs, and their study is what semiotics is all about.

Introducing Semiotics outlines the development of sign study from its precursors in the ancient world, via classical scholars like St Augustine and William of Ockham to Charles Sanders Peirce – whose writings laid the foundations of 21st-century semiotics – and beyond to semioticians such as Jakobson, Sebeok and Umberto Eco.

Paul Cobley’s incisive text and Litza Jansz’s brilliant illustrations identify the key semioticians and their work, and explain the simple concepts behind difficult terms. This book is the ideal starting place for anybody who wishes to know why signs are crucial to human existence.