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How Every Letter Tells a Story
Counterpoint
February 2015
On Sale: February 10, 2015
448 pages
ISBN: 1619024837
EAN: 9781619024830
Kindle: B00PSSF7QG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
How on Earth did we fix upon our twenty-six letters, what do
they really mean, and how did we come to write them down in
the first place? Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable
adventure through the history of the alphabet in twenty-six
vivid chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and
fascinating facts. Starting with the mysterious Phoenicians
and how sounds first came to be written down, he races on to
show how nonsense poems work, pins down the strange story of
OK, traces our five lost letters and tackles the tyranny of
spelling, among many many other things. His heroes of the
alphabet range from Edward Lear to Phyllis Pearsall (the
inventor of the A-Z), and from the two scribes of Beowulf to
rappers. Each chapter takes on a different subject - whether
it's codes, umlauts or the writing of dictionaries. Rosen's
enthusiasm for letters positively leaps off the page,
whether it's the story of his life told through the
typewriters he's owned or a chapter on jokes written in a
string of gags and word games. This is the book for anyone
who's ever wondered why Hawaiian only has a thirteen-letter
alphabet or how exactly to write down the sound of a wild
raspberry.
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