ABC books

The first books I made were alphabet books — mostly 26 pages, each with an illustration or some content related to a specific letter. About this time of year, I pull out my list of alphabet book ideas to see if one of them moves me to work on one or another of them. This time I decided to print my alphabet poster in some new colors. I’ll post pictures in the next few days.
I thought I bookmarked an interesting alphabet book I’d seen featured on someone’s blog a week or so ago . Alas I didn’t. I spent some time today trying to re-find the book, to no avail. But I found some other interesting ABC-ish things along the way.
Top left, David Sacks’ Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters, that combines a bit of history of alphabets with illustrations by many artists. You can see images from the book here and here.
In the middle is another book by Sacks, Letter Perfect, a history of the Roman alphabet. What I found interesting here is that the Kindle version looks to be a reformated version of the book. Which makes sense for a book with illustrations. I wish all books that had font changes or illustrations did that (I read Jill Lepore’s Blindspot on my Kindle, which alternates narrators in each chapter. In the print version, this is made obvious by the use of different fonts. On the Kindle — with only one font face — the book was confusing going until someone told me about the print version.)
On the right is Hemant Anant Jain‘s poster The Reader’s Alphabet. Each letter represents a famous literary character and a little text summarizes the story of the book in which the character appears. You can see a large version here.
And finally, this story about Ceejay Epton who, after having a baby decided to change her name to “help him learn the alphabet.” The new name: “Ceejay A Apple B Boat C Cat D Dog E Elephant F Flower G Goat H House I Igloo J Jellyfish K Kite L Lion M Monkey N Nurse O Octopus P Penguin Q Queen R Robot S Sun T Tree U Umbrella V Violin W Whale X X-Ray Y Yo-Yo Z Zebra Terryn Feuji-Sharemi”