Can you bend your body into the letter B? Too easy? What about the letter M? Ancient Greek playwrights had their characters mime and dance the letters of the alphabet, and the Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval has carried on this tradition. Lisa Merkin’s alphabet blocks also follow the tradition of manipulating bodies to make letter shapes. Which alphabet is the most acrobatic? Take a look at the characters making up the Hebrew letters in the Kennicott Bible. What word would you spell out with your body?
Anthon Beeke, Body Type (2011)
The Comical hotch-potch, or The alphabet turn’d posturemaster (London, c. 1800) Vet. A6 c.60 (5)
Barbara Crow, An acrobatic alphabet (1986) 171 d.769
[Woodcut block] (England, 18th century) Douce woodblocks f.2. For more on these woodcut letters, see “‘I dare say will please you when you see them’ – more ‘new’ wood-blocks of an old grotesque alphabet.” 18 April 2024. Andrew Honey (Bodleian and English Faculty, Oxford).
Hebrew Bible, La Coruña (Spain, 1476) MS. Kennicott 1
Lisa Merkin, Bodies Making Language (2021)
Vítězslav Nezval, Alphabet (1926/2001)
Online Exhibition Bonus!
Only remembered after the Alphabets Alive! exhibition opened at the Bodleian in July 2023, The Three Delevines and W.G. Shepherd (their impresario on the occasion in 1897) have nevertheless demanded an appearance online among the other embodied alphabets (or lettered bodies) included in the “B for Bodies” display.
First photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961, Rowland Scherman has been camera in hand for the Beatles in ’64, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album in ’68. and Crosby, Stills and Nash for their first recording in 1969. A bus ride in London in the 1970s revealed to him Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s “Alfabeto Figurato”, which led to another first: the first photo of a freestanding nude human alphabet: Love Letters (2008).
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