This year's selection for me was rather more readable on the same day, what with only being 118 pages long. However, it's also something that was completely up my alley, and went on my Amazon wishlist as soon as I found out it existed. That book is A is for Ox by Lyn Davies. There's a lot to think over in this one, to say the least.
So, first, the unwrapping experience. After all, the gift has been here for a few days, wrapped and everything. Wrapping paper as expected, removed, there's the big giant candy bar because Trader Joe's, and then... more wrapped things. The book was wrapped in paper by the seller that Mom got it from, and she only opened it far enough to take out the packing slip. But that's OK. Feels a little weird through the second layer, like it's a short-edge-bound book or something. And once I found an edge to start tearing from, that's what I initially thought I had, too. Except what I thought was the spine had no words, and looked awfully squared-off. Pulling it free, I discovered... a book in a box. This is actually rather exciting to me; when I find a book in a box, with very few exceptions, it's a Folio Society edition of something. These are amazing things to put on any bookshelf; the Folio Society produces high-quality hardcover editions of books with custom cover designs printed right on the bindings, no dust jackets, and boxes to protect them from shelf wear. Sometimes the boxes themselves have artwork on them, but sometimes, as in this case, they're just plain (but quite sturdy) boxes. The cover itself, as is perhaps fitting for the book, features a wraparound detail from an inscription in Pompeii (from a rubbing by the author), and the front cover bears an illustration from De Divina Proportione which is repeated on the title page.
The contents of the book come in two flavors. The first 60 or so pages, and the last four, are a general history of the development of the alphabet. The first chapter deals with the origins of writing itself in ancient Sumeria, and the influences that Sumerian writing had on that of the Egyptians. From there, the book moves to looking at the early alphabets used by the Egyptians and Phoenicians, before the third chapter deals with the formation of letters recognizable to modern readers, showing why the Greek alphabet is so different from those of languages derived from Latin (or, as in the case of English, languages that had the Latin alphabet thrust upon them), and ending with the formation of capital letters as can be seen in Roman sites, such as Trajan's Column or the archaeological treasure trove that is Pompeii. The fourth chapter covers the later development of minuscule, or lower-case letters, from the early Roman cursive scripts to their modern forms. The fifth chapter is at the very end of the book, and covers modern changes to the way letters are used, both in the rise of what is functionally our modern hieroglyphs as street signs and other symbolic communication (it takes much less time to parse a sign that indicates a slippery road than to read and understand 'Warning: Slippery Roads Ahead' when you're driving at speed), and also in the form of text-message shorthand, using letters and numbers for their name value rather than their pronounciation (such as using 'U' in place of you, or '2day' in place of today). Each chapter of the book is accompanied by illustrations depicting the writing being discussed, both with the writing isolated, and with its context shown, so that the reader is able to see what each writing system looks like and how it was used.
The second type of content found, and what is perhaps the most fascinating from a visual standpoint, is the middle portion of the book, between chapters 4 and 5. This section consists of 26 two-page spreads, each of which is devoted to a single letter of the English alphabet. The top half of the two pages in each case starts with the earliest known ancestor of the letter, which is almost always either Egyptian or Phoenician, though some examples of Semitic scripts appear as well. Each step of the development of those early letters toward the Roman capitals is shown, followed by the Roman cursive, and the development from those forms to the modern lower-case, always shown through a 15th century printing type. The bottom halves of the pages are a short writeup of the origin of the letter, how it made its way to Rome, and how later scribes created what we now use. This section also includes explanations of a few alphabetic oddities such as the ſ, which is so often misread as being an f in old manuscripts, but is actually another form of lower-case S.
If there's any complaint I can pose regarding this book, it's that it doesn't cover the few letters that have been lost by the English language over the centuries. In particular, I might have liked to see a few explorations of letters such as Eth (Ðð), Thorn (Þþ), or even the ampersand (🙲&), whose name comes from being considered the last letter of the alphabet until at least the 18th century (W, X, Y, Z, and, per se, and [and, by itself, and]). I do think the final chapter would need an update in a newer printing (the copyright is from 2006, so predates emoji's emergence in 2009), but its use of common signs such as 'No Smoking' still work very well for illustrating what is being talked about.
Certainly a worthwhile read, and an enjoyable one as well. Definitely a book that I would recommend for anyone who has any interest in the history of, well... writing.
