‘The Living Alphabet’ began one night in the autumn of 1975 with some rather awkward, lumpy drawings of alphabet creatures, some sitting motionless in a jungle setting, others positioned in outer space.
With many revisions, I came to realize that I wanted to create a believable species of creature that would have offered early homo sapiens a model for creating letters – a template for our Alphabet. This creation fulfills the dictum ‘In the beginning all wisdom and knowledge were with the animals’ (Joseph Campbell).
In 2017, I published ‘Before Alphabets’, which visually introduces all of the letter creatures. Throughout the eighties and nineties, a story line evolved about their conception (by a Great Weaver of Words) and their journey to Planet earth and subsequent discovery by Argo, a simple dust frog chosen to become the A. This myth finds form in ‘Quite Early One Planet: The Arrival’ (2023).
More recently, the ‘Living Alphabet’ has evolved to assert itself in defining words. It’s a kind of ‘theatre of words’ as each letter creature expresses its own opinions about the words it participates in, and reacts accordingly. These lively exchanges unfold in ‘A Secret Life of Words’ (2024) and ‘Word World’ (2025).
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