The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Letters

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 that comprise one of civilization's greatest inventions, 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.

Firmage, usually an editor and designer of other's books, has himself written, designed, illustrated, and typeset this learned and occasionally comic homage to the Roman alphabet--the building blocks of his trade and, he makes clear, of Western civilization itself. To a generation raised on Sesame Street--where letters are animated, personalized, empowered, and celebrated--Firmage's compendium of lore will seem like a logical extension of childhood, a postgraduate course in the alphabet. Addressing himself to the ``light-hearted, the fun-loving, and the free-thinking,'' the author draws on numerous disciplines--religion, physics, music, art, architecture, numerology, astronomy, astrology, math, literature, philology, calligraphy, etc.--and on various histories (of typography, paper, and printing) to create individual genealogies of letters--attributing biographies to them, as well as personalities and reputations. There's the ``legitimacy'' of the letter H; the ``hidden world'' of I; the ``success story'' of J; the ``celebrated'' O; the ``much used, often abused'' T; and the ``philosophical'' Y. Firmage considers influences both ancient and modern--from cave paintings to computers, from the Pythagoreans, cabalists, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Celts, Greeks, and Plato to Gutenberg, Benjamin Franklin, James Thurber, Marshall McLuhan, and Dr. Seuss. He populates the ``magical, powerful'' world of the alphabet with hundreds of historical, fanciful, artistic, and emblematic designs--some integrated into the text, others running along the bottom of the page--and comments on their uses, flaws, and evolution. A triumph of presentation on many levels, not the least of which is Firmage's narrative voice--congenial, well-paced, wide- ranging, and gifted with a clear sense of his readership. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.