All Around the Block: An Alphabet (2008)

All Around the Block: An Alphabet (2008)
Judy Pelikan
Hardcover H168 x W145 mm. 56 pages. Acquired from Amazon, 24 September 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

From the cover to the last letter, Judy Pelikan’s book is an extended visual pun with more puns in between. Some of the resulting images (like that for the letter A) are deeply clever; others (like that for the letter Z) are surreal. Obviously A is for a box of apples, but the uppercase serif A on yellowed grid paper with drawn guidelines recalls the early designers of geometrically created letters such as Feliciano, Pacioli, Durer, Tory and others. Driving home the recollection, the artist has laid out the tools for such typographical design: compass, straightline and pen. Here, “all around the block” is all about the square.

Most of the visual puns are simple like B for books and blocks; others are straightforward but dense like C for crate, cloud, curl, cup, coffee and castle (that’s six for all sides of the block!); others are strange. For the letter Z, we have the surreality of a zebra and her foal grazing on top of the block on whose front panel a zebra moth or butterfly hovers by a ziggurat behind an old-fashioned console (Zenith?) with a third zebra peering from its screen.

All Around the Block warrants a closer look on each page as well as favorable comparison and contrast with any of the works noted below.

Further Reading

“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.

“Graeme Base“. Books On Books Collection. In progress.

“Leonard Brett“. Books On Books Collection. In progress.

Leslie Haines 4 November 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Rose Sanderson“. 30 May 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Pat Sweet“. 18 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Katie Viggers“. Books On Books Collection. In progress.