Alphabetical Order: How the Alphabet Began (1998) Tiphaine Samoyault Casebound, illustrated glossy paper over boards, decorated doublures. H270 x W195 mm. 32 unnumbered pages. Acquired from World of Books, 15 August 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Alphabetical Order is a translation. Its original title — Le Monde des pictogrammes (Paris: Circonflexe, 1996) — better reflects the well-illustrated character of the book. The images, the hand lettering, the ghost-printed background and handling of color are constant reminders of the pictographic roots of most alphabets and writing systems. The final section — Artists and Alphabets — punctuates those reminders. In fact, the book’s endpapers act as quotation marks around the point.
Diringer, David, and Reinhold Regensburger. 1968. The alphabet: a key to the history of mankind. London: Hutchinson. A standard, beginning to be challenged by late 20th and early 21st century archaeological findings and palaeographical studies.
How Our Alphabet Grew: The History of the Alphabet(1972) William Dugan Casebound, illustrated paper on board, illustrated endpapers and pastedowns. H320 x W227 mm. 72 pages. Acquired 14 March 2023. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Curiously, little information about William Dugan appears online. He was a prolific illustrator of children’s books — especially those published by Golden Press in the 1960s and 1970s. He also authored as well as illustrated several early childhood books — on insects, signs, machines and vehicles. Two of his books, however, are meant for older children — this one and All about Houses (1975), which is a forerunner to Dorling Kindersley‘s children’s reference books.
Dugan’s ability to alter his style as writer and illustrator to the ages of his audience is notable. Even more notable is the diversity and inclusiveness of his reference works for older children. Despite the date of publication, a young girl occupies the foreground of the illustration of archaeologists, a feature that would have brought a smile to Ada Yardeni and still might to Tiphaine Samoyault.
Diringer, David, and Reinhold Regensburger. 1968. The alphabet: a key to the history of mankind. London: Hutchinson. A standard, beginning to be challenged by late 20th and early 21st century archaeological findings and palaeographical studies.
There is gray between what is unknown and known about the invention of shapes and signs for sounds. In the Books On Books collection, one side is reflected by works such as Cari Ferraro’s The First Writing (2004) and William Joyce’s The Numberlys (2014); the other, by Lyn Davies’ A is for Ox (2006) and Tiphaine Samoyault’s Alphabetical Order (1998). One engages myth, artistic extrapolation or fictional representation; the other, the rational, the evidentiary mundane or non-fictional presentation.
Ada Yardeni’s A- dventure- Z’: The Story of the Alphabet (2003) arches between them. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. As a designer at Koren Publishing, she created the font “Ada”, after which she went on to receive her doctorate under Joseph Naveh at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1991 and become an acknowledged expert in Hebrew palaeography.
Paired with intricate and annotated black and white diagrams, Yardeni’s illustrations use brilliant colors, an accomplished calligraphic hand and her palaeographic, historical and linguistic understanding of the alphabet to display the evolution of each letter based on its forms as they appear in ancient inscriptions. While most of the illustrations contain the cartoon figures seen below in the display of the Hebrew Bet and Arabic Ba:’, the illustration for the letter Samekh (on which the letter X is based) takes on the aspect of abstract pop art.
Alongside the diagrams, the clear, uncluttered text delivers a scholarly assuredness about the appearance, disappearance and changes of strokes in the early signs found in the Sinai, but the artistry somehow evokes the mystery that continues to envelop the invention of shapes and signs for sounds and the differences in the many writing and alphabetical systems around the world. Yardeni’s still more scholarly works are to be found elsewhere, but A- dventure- Z’: The Story of the Alphabet holds its own as a companion to any of the reference works noted below. With its graphics and its charming tale of a Canaanite king seeking a way to preserve his songs, it also holds its own with any of the children’s books noted below.
Werner, Sharon, and Sharon Forss. Alphabeasties (2009).
Reference works
Clodd, Edward. The Story of the Alphabet (1913). Superseded by several later works, but is freely available online with line illustrations and some black and white photos.
Diringer, David, and Reinhold Regensburger. The alphabet: a key to the history of mankind (1968). A standard, beginning to be challenged by late 20th and early 21st century archaeological findings and palaeographical studies.
Thompson, Tommy. The ABC of our alphabet (1952).Not a fine press publication or artist’s book, but its layout, illustrations and use of two colors bear comparison with the Davies book. It too is out of print and unfortunately more rare.
A fair number of fiction and non-fiction children’s books on the history of the alphabet have made their way into the Books On Books Collection.
Of the fiction variety, there is Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Story” of the alphabet’s invention: How the Alphabet Was Made (1983), illustrated by Chloe Cheese. Another fiction entry is James Rumford’s retelling of Cadmus’ visit to Crete in There’s a Monster in the Alphabet (2002) and William Joyce’s inventive The Numberlys (2014).
In the non-fiction category are William Dugan’s How Our Alphabet Grew (1972), Tiphaine Samoyault’s Alphabetical Order (1998), Renzo Rossi’s The Revolution of the Alphabet (2009) and the entry here: Don Robb’s and Anne Smith’s Ox, House, Stick.
Ox, House, Stick is scheduled to appear as part of an exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford (opening 15 July 2023). “A is for Ox” designates the display case devoted to the question: Where did the alphabet come from? It’s not just a question for archaeologists, historians, linguists and paleographers — or children’s book authors and illustrators. It’s one generating repeated inspiration for book artists as shown by Abe Kuipers’ Letters (1971), Lanore Cady’s Houses & Letters (1977), another rendition of the Kipling tale by Gerald Lange in The Neolithic Adventures of Taffi-Mai Metallu-Mai (1997), designed by Gerald Lange and produced with Robin Price, Dave Wood’s Alphabetica (2002), Cari Ferraro’s The First Writing (2004), and Helen Malone’s Alphabetic Codes (2005).
Artists’ books share much with children’s books in general. 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. Children’s alphabet books in particular display features that appeal to book artists: play with animals, the Babel of languages, bodies, calligraphy, colors, design (of letters, page and book) and, as above, alphabet origin stories. Viewing and exploring alphabet books and artist’s books side by side heightens the enjoyment and appreciation of both.
First appearing in 1942, Samuel Winfield (Tommy) Thompson’s somewhat forgotten children’s introduction to the history of the alphabet occupies an interesting position in that line of work that includes Oscar Ogg’s The 26 Letters (1964), Tiphaine Samoyault’s Alphabetical Order (1998), Renzo Rossi’s The Revolution of the Alphabet (2009) and Don Robb’s Ox, House, Stick (2010). For a collector of children’s alphabet books and alphabet-related artists’ books, the decision whether to acquire it balances on its interior design and content.
With its overlay of second-color illustrations on the text, Thompson’s book makes for an interesting forerunner to Lyn Davies’ fine press A is for Ox. Thompson falls prey to instances of illegibility from the technique, but both enjoy instances of brilliant juxtaposition of word and redrawn images.
Among the primers of alphabet history, Thompson’s also stands out for the attention it gives to North American Indian pictorial writing. Rather than the usual Eurocentric sources, the Leni-Lenape, Dakota and Sioux Nations provide the bulk of examples of the method. The enlightened perspective, however, is undercut by a strain of cultural and historical supremacy apparent in several passages and, in particular, the perpetuation of the Walum Olum hoax and inclusion of a chapter from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha to stand in for the absence of any similar memorialization of painted grave posts. Although Thompson is point blank on how “the invasion of the white man” prevented the growth and development of this method of writing, consider this passage describing the Leni-Lenape Penn Treaty of 1682 that was woven with perforated shell beads (wampum):
The figures of a white man and an Indian are woven in the belt, clasping hands in a true gesture of friendship. The white man is portrayed wearing a hat, as the Indian always drew the symbol of the white man. This treaty of peace was never broken or forgotten.
Except that, in the 1860s, most of the Leni-Lenape Nation was forcibly displaced to Oklahoma.
It was not until the 1990s that the so-called Leni-Lenape cosmographical poems of Walum Olum were proven to be fake, but suspicions were strong in the 1930s. All this is compounded as the book laments the ephemerality of the “Walum Olum poems” and the custom of pictorial grave posts:
Pictorial epitaphs on Indian grave posts were quite common in the early days of the new world. But knowledge of this romantic custom as well as the knowledge of the Red Man’s art of picture writing will live forever, had there been no other record of him but the beautiful “Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Thompson’s design skills and his side note of claim to fame as reportedly the first recipient of royalties for typeface design (Thompson Quill Script) nudged the balance toward acquisition. Maybe perversely the annoying cultural dissonance also nudged the balance in that direction. The book’s presence provides the opportunity to compare it line for line with the other primers and look harder for the signs of the cultural blinkers we are wearing now. Also, with authentic pictorial cosmography available from the Navajo (Diné) Nation and with new archaeological finds from the Middle East (see below for both), perhaps it is time for a new primer against which to compare Thompson and the rest.
A review of the film Canyon del Muerto about one of the first female archaeologists, Ann Axtell Morris. What has this to do with Thompson’s book? An ironic coincidence. Morris worked for the archaeologist Sylvanus G. Morley on his Yucatán expedition. Thompson cites Morley in his bibliography. With her husband, fellow archaeologist Earl Morris, and their Navajo team, Ann Morris went on to open the Canyon del Muerto to the discoveries that led to insights into the Ancestral Puebloans, the source of Navajo cosmography. Other than papers coauthored with Earl, Ann’s accounts could only find outlet as juvenile publications. While Sylvanus and Earl may have been the combined inspiration for Indiana Jones, Ann offers the status of artist, first female archaeologist and subject of a current movie as a role model to celebrate with a sidebar in a new history of writing.
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