{"id":14806,"date":"2014-01-23T02:25:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T02:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=14806"},"modified":"2014-01-23T02:25:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T02:25:12","slug":"the-royal-picture-alphabet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2014\/01\/23\/the-royal-picture-alphabet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Royal Picture Alphabet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Another pictorial alphabet but no architecture this time. “Royal” is used here in the more general sense of “grand” or “first-rate”, and this isn’t the only example of an instruction book for children that calls its alphabet a royal one.\u00a0John Leighton’s Royal Picture Alphabet<\/em><\/a> is a finer example than others to be found at the Internet Archive, however, where the results are either very simple<\/a> or, in the case of Walter Crane’s Absurd ABC<\/em><\/a>, might have benefitted from additional pages. It’s surprising that Leighton’s book is a more substantial piece of work than Crane’s when Crane wrote a history of book design<\/a>. <\/em><\/em>Leighton’s alphabet is also surprisingly polysyllabic; you can’t imagine anyone today choosing “Eccentricity” to represent the letter E.<\/p>\n

Books such as this always have trouble with the letters at the end of the alphabet, especially that tricky X. The Royal Picture Alphabet<\/em> chooses “Xantippe”, the wife of Socrates, while its earlier counterpart has “Xanthus”, a horse from Greek mythology. (That old stand-by, the xylophone, didn’t become established until later in the 19th century.) Both books, and Crane’s volume, offer “Zany” for the letter Z.<\/p>\n

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Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Giovanni Battista Pian\u2019s Pictorial Alphabet<\/a>
\n\u2022 Antonio Basoli\u2019s Pictorial Alphabet<\/a>
\n\u2022 Grand capitals<\/a>
\n\u2022 Paulini\u2019s mythological alphabet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another pictorial alphabet but no architecture this time. “Royal” is used here in the more general sense of “grand” or “first-rate”, and this isn’t the only example of an instruction book for children that calls its alphabet a royal one.\u00a0John Leighton’s Royal Picture Alphabet is a finer example than others to be found at the … Continue reading “The Royal Picture Alphabet”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,4,48],"tags":[5670,549],"class_list":["post-14806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-design","category-illustrators","tag-john-leighton","tag-walter-crane"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3QO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}