Letters have particular sounds, so why not colors and tastes? Artists have delighted in the phenomenon called synesthesia where information seems to stimulate unrelated senses. Vladimir Nabokov experienced letters as colors, and Sonia Delaunay insists that we remember what C tastes like. The artists in medieval manuscripts painted elaborate letters to highlight important text, illuminating them with gold and color to make them ‘pop’. Květa Pacovská insists that her brightly colored letters don’t just pop, but pop up, and Lisa McGarry returns them to childhood’s alphabet blocks as a reminder: BE AMAZED.
We reflect our world view through our letters*: hornbooks with their religious catechisms; moralizing Victorian alphabet books; and the racist ABC in Dixie. Knowing this, authors and artists use alphabets to disrupt the status quo and raise moral and social concerns: conspiracy paranoia, endangered animals, sexism and racism. [Links in the captions will take you to more images and details.]
Doing the work of learning the ABCs or the International Code of Signals is about memorizing. Doing the work with Mourning/Warning: An Abecedarian (2015) is about memorializing. It signals a warning to present dangers.
In light of Tia Blassingame’s Mourning/Warning, can Louise & George Bonte’s ABC In Dixie (1900?) be simply dismissed as an anachronism?
Wendy Ewald’sAmerican Alphabets (2005) offers a hopeful view and reminder that there is more than one alphabet.
If all alphabets have a world view, can an alphabet be bent and arranged into a new world view? In 2018, the Nova Scotia Chapter of the Global Afrikan Congress facilitated a “book-in-a-day” event to help the children of Halifax create R is for Reparations(2019), which answers that question.
Celebrating role models is another tool in the alphabet-book box for changing world views. In ABCs That Look Like You And Me (2020), the artist Ja’nai Harris uses featureless but allusive portraits onto which the reader is invited to project his or her own features.
Now that A is for Apple Inc. rather than the fruit, Bård Ionson wonders, “What are our children learning as they navigate digital devices vs. when children used wooden tablets with narrow ideas presented with pictograms.” Battledore (2019) explores the implications by using an Augmented Reality app to plunge the viewer into the digital realm.
In Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet(2016), David McLimans redraws the alphabet’s capital letters to look like animals not yet extinct but on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
In Rescuing Q (2023), Suzanne Moore uses her beautiful calligraphy to disassociate the letter Q from QAnon, misinformation and conspiracy-thinking, and restore it to open-minded, open-hearted questions.
Tupoka Ogette’s Ein rassismuskritisches Alphabet(2022) presents another attempt at changing world views — in whatever country they arise.
And sometimes it’s good just to reverse-appropriate “the” alphabet, which Arial Robinson does inThe Modern Day Black Alphabet (2020) with joy and pride.
A Typographic Abecedarium(2015) Ornan Rotem Perfect bound in a softcover case. H174 x W176 mm. 136 pages 1 poster (64 x 48 cm, folded to 16 x 16 cm). Acquired from Devils in the Detail Ltd, 14 March 2023. Photos of the book: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Ornan Rotem calls his book a “photo-typographic essay … a meditation … [e]xploring the relationship between typography and the visual world around us ….” As shown in the double-page spread below, his meditation is shaped across a four dimensional views of the letterform: the four-dimensional, three-dimensional, two-dimensional and the one-dimensional. At the end of the essay, there are 26 miniature essays that will send the reader back to enjoy each letter’s four dimensional entries again.
Everywhere you look you can see an E smiling at you (just saying it induces a smile). In 1969, Georges Perec, whose own name has four Es, tried exorcising the E by writing an esoteric 300-page novel, La disparition, without ever using one. I wonder how he would have felt had he come across this E — which was shot in Paris — when he was writing the novel. ¶ If you want to endow letters with character, then I suppose E would be the lively sort, hence the printed form comes from a 1948 cover of LIFE magazine.
Much is packed into these miniature essays. Naturally for an artist’s book celebrating type, there are the necessary self-referential typographic puns in the one above: character and sort. In all, there is the evidence of the long, multi-place, multi-source contemplative gestation of the work. In the example above, the allusion to Perec’s novel leads to the 1969 photo in Paris (or was it vice versa?). The typographic puns lead to a search for an E from a LIFE cover (again, or was it vice versa?). This circular connectedness over time, text and image highlights the self-referentiality of the genre of the artist’s book.
While the dense allusiveness might suggest that this is a work limited to an adult audience, A Typographic Abecedarium does find favor with a younger audience — no doubt because it speaks to the phenomenon of seeing letters everywhere and in multiple dimensions.
Physical Poetry Alphabet (2018) is a curious work. The Thames & Hudson-style production values combined with the knowledgeable essay in it by Ornan Rotem makes one think of Andrew Robinson’s The Story of Writing, an actual Thames & Hudson book. While the acrobatics of Erika Lemay echo the longstanding tradition of modeling the letters with the human body, followed by Erté, Vítězslav Nezval, Anthon Beeke and Rowland Scherman and so ingeniously summarized by Lisa Merkin, Lemay’s elaborate costumes and the scene design echo the traditions of Hollywood, Las Vegas and the fashion industry, which is not surprising given the involvement of Douglas Kirkland, portrait photographer to the stars. A Typographic Abecedarium strikes its singular target of “photo-typographic essay”. Having too many targets, Physical Poetry Alphabet perhaps misses its several bull’s eyes, but to follow along with its mixed metaphors, it undeniably delivers a shop full of eye candy.
Alongside the alphabet mnemonic “A was an Archer who shot at a frog”, “A was an Apple” was a staple for the early primer publishers such as Dean, John Evans, J.L. Marks and J. & C. Mozley. Kate Greenaway revived it in the 1880s. Among the more interesting successors in the 20th and 21st centuries are Ben Sands (1966) with his bold lino-cuts, Tracy Campbell Pearson (1986) with her lengthy leporello, Allison Murray (2011) with her introduction of animals and Gennady Spirin (2020) with his watercolors echoing Arthur Rackham, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Renaissance. William Cheney’s type and Bela Blau’s binding of it in the ABC For Tiny Schools (1975) bring to it a handmade elegance in miniature.
The Alphabet Effect (2013) Nancy Anderson Trottier Double-sided meander fold. 630 x 630 mm. 24 panels. Edition of 15. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 2 August 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This miniature reproduces a larger unique artist’s book created by Nancy Anderson Trottier. Bound in marbled boards with ribbon ties, the small book’s text concerning art and philosophy meanders among stamped signs and symbols and calligraphed letters of the alphabet printed on both sides of a single sheet cut and following the meander fold structure. When the “pages” are unfolded and rearranged into the single sheet fully extended, the alphabet effect appears. To squeeze 26 letters into 24 panels, the letters e and f are paired on one panel, as are k and l on another.
Alphabet Alfresco (1985) Carol Cunningham Casebound miniature, decorated cloth, colored doublures. H40 x W52 mm. 68 pages. Acquired from Lorson’s Books & Prints, 5 December 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Carol Cunningham’s Sunflower Press produced many gems like this. Founder of the Miniature Book Society in 1983, Cunningham also produced numerous oil paintings and prints, some of which can be found here.
À l’infini(2007) Květa Pacovská Softcover with protective Mylar attached, exposed spine, sewn with multicolored threads. 270 x 270 x 29 mm. 128 pages. Acquired from Rakuten, 25 November 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Buzz Lightyear character of Toy Story and his catchphrase “To infinity and beyond” arrived in 1995. While it seems unlikely that the catchphrase influenced Květa Pacovská, the audience for Á l’infini (2007) and that for Toy Story definitely overlap. In her invitation below, Pacovská explicitly addresses the youngest of her audience: Tu peux regarder chaque lettre, toucher chaque lettre, considérer chaque lettre de façon formelle ou lire chaque lettre à haute voix. Chaque lettre a son propre son, sa propre forme et sa propre couleur. Note leurs différences quand tu les prononces, quand tu écoutes le son de ta voix. [You can look at each letter, touch each letter, consider each letter formally, or read each letter aloud. Each letter has its own sound, shape and color. Note their differences when you pronounce them, when you listen to the sound of your voice.] Above all — literally at the top of the page — she urges the reader: Dis la lettre <<A>> à haute voix jusqu’à ce qu’elle heurte les murs qui l’entourent. [Say the letter “A” out loud until it knocks down the walls surrounding it.], which is what the cut-out A plays outs.
For Pacovská, letters are “the architecture of pleasure”, and À l’infini invites us to play with them in “her city of paper”. Her invitation notes alternative approaches to the book, but the suggestion to walk through it as a paper sculpture is the best and appeal to the child in everyone.
With its collage of cut-outs, pop-ups, spot varnishes, reflective silver ink, letters and, later in the book, numbers, À l’infini is a joyful visual city. Pacovská received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992 for her illustration.
An Alphabet Coloring Book by Theodore Menten (1997)
An Alphabet Coloring Book by Theodore Menten (1997) Juniper Von Phitzer Miniature leporello. Closed: H64 x W52 mm. 8 pages. Limited edition. Acquired from Book Lair, 30 October 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Lloyd L. Neilson, founder of Juniper Von Phitzer Press, compiled its name from those of his three cats, a sure sign of his sense of humor. This one signals that, like the cats, its humor was patient on the hunt. Theodore Menten had produced a coloring book called The Illuminated Alphabet in 1971 for Dover Publications. After a quarter century, Juniper Von Phitzer could not fail to pounce, capture and deposit the ultimate trophy: a miniature alphabet coloring book with a faux crayon. It was a limited edition, but individual copies could be distinguished by the color of the plastic crayon. The Books On Books Collection is proud to have this particular copy with its red crayon honoring the tradition of rubrication in medieval manuscripts.
The archives of Juniper Von Phitzer Press reside at Indiana University, several universities and institutions hold copies of its numerous alphabet miniatures, and Neilson’s dedication to the craft (and his cats) was honored with a miniature gilt-stamped bibliography from the equally humorously named Opuscula Press [opuscula = small or minor literary or musical works].
“Human society, the world, man as a whole, is in the alphabet.… The alphabet is a source.” — Victor Hugo.
“… the Book, the total expansion of the letter” — Stéphane Mallarmé
“I see new horizons approaching me and the hope of another alphabet.” Marcel Broodthaers
“There is indeed something magical about the look of the alphabet: it has to do with its infinite capacity to change shape and style, to express purpose and suggest mood, to be formal and informal, elegant and ugly, classical and romantic, delicate and robust.” — Mel Gooding
“… the letter is repeatedly a lens through which Western culture makes sense of itself and its world.” — Laurence de Looze
What do alphabets and artists’ books have to do with one another?
Early on, alphabets and books cast their magical spells over us. Learning the alphabet is a childhood rite of passage for us. We play with letters on blocks and nesting boxes. Someone points and reads the letters to us. We mouth, chew and play with the books whose pages we learn are turned or devices whose screens we learn are swiped. We sing the alphabet song and memorize the letters. We learn to draw them and make sense of our world with those “shapes for sounds”. The alphabet taps the imagination in material and immaterial ways that are deep-rooted.
The magic of the alphabet flows into the magic of the book. Historians of the book know this. It is no accident that so many chroniclers of the history of the book begin with the ABCs. Why pay so much attention to the birth of the alphabet to get to the birth of the codex? Is it the professional historian’s habit –to begin at the beginning, to ask what were the causes of this or that event, invention or change? Or is it the habit of myth-making, of storytelling — the magic of “once upon a time” that leads to “once upon a time, there was an alphabet, and then along came books”? Mel Gooding’s explanation of what’s magical about the alphabet could equally apply to the book: it, too, has the “capacity to change shape and style, to express purpose and suggest mood, to be formal and informal, elegant and ugly, classical and romantic, delicate and robust.”
In general, children’s books and artists’ books have much in common. They both play with form and structure. They play with words and images, sometimes images without words and sometimes just shapes. Almost always an attention to all the senses. Perhaps the alphabet rite of passage inspires a later one. For many designers, typographers, printers and book artists, creating an alphabet book is a common rite of passage.
In particular, children’s alphabet books have even more in common with artists’ books. Both play with animals, bodies, colors, design (of letters, page and book), calligraphy, the Babel of languages and alphabet origin stories and more. Artists’ books inspired by the alphabet, or even just one letter of it, focus our senses and attention on more than the letter. They may focus our senses on the possible shapes the book as container can take. Or the elements and parts of the book (ink, paper, cover, binding, pages, margins and other blank spaces, preliminaries, chapters, running heads, etc.). Or the very idea of the book. The choice of cloth for a book’s cover may have its unconscious origin in touching a linen ABC primer. The use of thick laser-cut pages or highly tactile paper surfaces may be rooted in early childhood board books or “Pat the Bunny” books. The choice to use the accordion structure or scroll for an artist’s abecedary may lie in the linearity of the alphabet. Or the artist may be challenging that linearity with structures that echo the boxes of Joseph Cornell or the boîte-valise of Marcel Duchamp — or a bag of alphabet blocks.
With two such potent sources of magic on offer, how can the child in the book artist resist recreating the “once upon a time” when image and letter seemed to be one and the same thing? Only under certain circumstances does the play with letters and the book become art rather than the commonplace. Only when the artist, author, designer, typesetter (or keyboardist), printer and binder digs through the material aspects and conceptual aspects of the book right down to the letters of the alphabet, fusing the elements of the alphabet (or writing system) with the elements of the book, does the work sing (or at least hum) to us.
So here begins the journey from source to artists’ books where letters and characters turn into the world, the world turns into letters and characters, and alphabets come to life.
List of “Display Cases”
For the exhibition Alphabets Alive! — at Oxford University’s Weston Library from 18 July 2023 through 24 January 2024 — the Bodleian Libraries have brought together over 150 works — from medieval manuscripts to the AI-generated — all inspired by the alphabet and the book. Across the street from the Weston is the Old Bodleian Library, whose entrance the Proscholium houses an additional display case where works from Ron King, Kevin M. Steele and artists of the Movable Book Society point to the main exhibition.
Below, the “online display cases” of the exhibition are arranged alphabetically, concluding with a bibliography of the items consulted for the exhibition’s curation.
Where do letters go when they’re not making words? Book artists know that they hide everywhere – often in plain sight – in landscapes, roadworks and signs, tree branches, rocks, flags, and even in a cup of coffee. [Links in the captions will take you to more images and details.]
Books On Books 