The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Letters

If you think you know your alphabet, think again. Drawing from mythology, cosmology, history, the Bible, literature, and esoteric and conventional sources, this book takes the reader on a tour of each of the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet. In chapters that are descriptive, illustrative and diverse, we are shown the history and development of every letter, how its shape evolved, how its characteristics were encoded, and how its history, attributes, and meanings were reflected in myth, literature, science and religion. Rich in surprises and serendipities, profusely illustrated with related drawings from ancient scripts to present-day digitised computer alphabets, and quoting sources as diverse as James Joyce, Rabelais, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Elmer Fudd and Bob Dylan, "The Alphabet" is a book for all those who know their abcs, but perhaps not as well as they imagined.