P is for Pterodactyl (2018)

P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever (2018)
Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter & Maria Tina Beddia
Hardback, illustrated paper on boards, dustjacket. H222 x W286 mm. 40 pages. Purchased from Amazon, 17 August 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

If a posthumous revision of Eric Partridge’s Comic Alphabets were possible, this one would have to be included. But why did it take so long for the oddball abecedary and the oddities of spelling to meet in “The Worst Alphabet Book Ever“? Or maybe the 19th century spelling reformer Alexander J. Ellis compiled a still-to-be-discovered abecedary displaying a carp above the word ghoti.

Apropos of carp, though: the entry for bdellium is irritating on two scores. First, it is not the only word dumb enough to begin with “b”; there is also bdellatomy and bdellometer. Second, while true that the tree producing the gum resin bdellium is native to the East Indies and Africa, there are words other than dumb ending in a silent /b/ that the authors might have chosen to underscore their point. But they didn’t and fell into the sticky colonial trap illustrated (somewhat more obviously) below.

From Abc En Relief (1955) 
Jo Zagula and Marguerite Thiebold
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

Further Reading

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

“Alphabets Alive! – Adventures“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

Ellis, Alexander John. 1848. A Plea for Phonetic Spelling. 2d ed. London: F. Pitman.

Partridge, Eric, and Michael Foreman. 1961. Comic Alphabets : Their Origin Development Nature. London: Routledge & Paul.

Harris, Chris and Dan Santat. 2020. The Alphabet’s Alphabet .First ed. New York: Little Brown and Company.