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Alphababel or An Illustrated Tower of Languabets

By John Hutton

2002
Brown morocco and brown latticed paste paper

Thornwillow Press is pleased to announce ALPHABABEL -- a visual alphabet in three languages!

A picture book in the tradition of the great Victorian illustrators, ALPHABABEL was inspired by the visual humor of Tenniel, Doyle, Leech and Caldecott. John Hutton has created a series of twenty six alphabet stories in line-- with additional marginal drawings-- to be decifered by the clever and discerning reader!

Each page of the book is dedicated to a single letter. The reader will find large and small illustrations and an accompanying guide list of five to seven words in English. The word lists also appear in French and German, in the hopes of promoting a healthy state of BABEL-DOM-the learning of LANGUABETS- of foreign tongues!

The GAME: to explore the pictures and find, with eye and imagination, as many words as one can which start with the letter of the moment. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are all possible. While the guide list may be used as a starting point, the artist claims that as many as twenty to thirty words can be found for some letters!

Each lettered page is equally rich, and Thornwillow Press is pleased to offer such a whimsical alphabet, full of mystery and discovery.

John Hutton was educated at Princeton, Harvard and the University of London. He has designed stationery for Cartier and Montblanc, and his illustrations have appeared in several Thornwillow publications. This is his first full-length picture book.

Savine Pontifell is certified as a simultaneous translator from Georgetown University in Washington D.C.

Charlotte Pontifell is two years old.

The Edition

Each copy is hand-bound in moroccan goatskin and specially designed handmade paste papers, and has endpages worth exploring. The text is printed letterpress on paper handmade for this edition at Bohemia Paper in the Czech Repubolic. The edition is limited to 300 copies. Each volume is numbered and signed.