Ox, House, Stick: The History of Our Alphabet (review)

What a tormented alphabet we have: letters have, over their lifetime, been stretched, truncated, inverted, pilfered, abandoned, and readopted; Sinaitic people, Phoenicians, early and classical Greeks, and Romans all claim paternity; it can't even identify a birth date, having origins from 1500 B.C. to seventeenth century C.E. It does make fascinating reading, though, as Robb's brief introduction on pictograms, phonetic symbols, and ancient Mediterranean culture segues into focused encounters with individual and groups of related letters that now form our Roman alphabet. Each double-page spread presents the object the letter is thought to originally represent, the way the shape of the letter morphed over the centuries, and the way its pronunciation was adapted by various cultures. There's a wealth of detail here, and readers will be forgiven if their memories can't quite sort the finer points of aleph and zed by book's end. Robb keeps tight control on the floodgates of data, though, by interjecting generous sidebars on bigger picture issues such as the pesky relationship between vowels and consonants that share the same letter, various options for ordering words on a page (boustrophedon—backward and forward "as the ox plows"—looks like a class project waiting to happen), and the fact there's no compelling reason why the ABCs ended up in the order they did. Smith's cheerful gouache paintings include some perfunctory scenes and artifacts from the ancient world, but they perform their most valuable service in clearly demonstrating the mutations of the letters themselves. A closing chart summarizes some of the data included in the text, and a list of resources including children's books and websites make this as useful for report writers as it will be entertaining for recreational readers who revel in Did you know?s.