Customer Reviews

The Disappearing Alphabet

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I highly recommend this book. The lines are easy to remember, and are very quotable. They provide an introduction to poetry and to the play with language. They introduce vocabulary with humor. The illustrations are quite extraordinary, the print of high quality.

Richard Wilbur's The Disappearing Alphabet imagines what the world would be like if the letters of the alphabet vanished, in verses on subjects ranging from the ordinary to silly to sublime and existential. For instance, without "G," there would be no green and oak trees would be blue and pastures pink; without "N," birds would have wigs instead of wings; as for "O":

What if there were no letter O?
You couldn't COME, you couldn't GO,
You couldn't ROVE, you couldn't ROAM,
And yet you couldn't stay at HOME!
Where would you be, had heaven not sent you
The letter O to orient you?

Each letter is portrayed on a single page, with verses ranging from two to twelve lines. Each verse is beautifully illustrated by David Diaz's exquisite and unexpected designs, such as a lovely banana with a disgusting eel instead of a peel (illustrating the importance of the letter "P"). Diaz's illustrations are stylized in intense, gradient, glowing colors. The illustrations each overlay a pale yellow version of the letter found somewhere in the background of the page. The type is treated with the same care as the illustrations, with the letter to which the verse is addressed set off in a bold, colorful, sans serif font. Younger children will enjoy the nonsense-like poetry and the playfulness of the language, while older children will discover new and unusual vocabulary words and find inspiration by the possibilities of language. The introduction exhorts children to protect the alphabet: "Be careful, then, my friends, and do not let / Anything happen to the alphabet." This book will offer children of all ages an appreciation of letters, words, and language.

I used this book in my K class and they understood some of it. I would recommend this book for grades 3 and up.

The title for my review says it all. This book is totally charming in words and illustration. I am 77 plus, our children and grandchildren are all grown but I love the book. It will be a coffee table book in this home until someone begs for it, and then . . . I will order another.

Too clever for words, really!

What would you do if the first letter of your name would disappear? Richard Wilbur gives a comical way to view the disappearance of the alphabet. He makes his readers think about the importance of the alphabet. 'What if there were no letter A? Cows would eat HY instead of HAY' This would be an excellent book to read to elementary students. After reading this book, they could think of what other words would be or sound like with a letter missing. The illustrations by David Diaz are unique to say the least. He uses vibrant colors and illustraions to stress the importance of what Wilbur is trying to convey. This book made me think about the alphabet in a different way. It will do the same for young readers.

This book has its moments when it is clever and funny, but at other times it is puzzling and downright nerdy (particularly the bit when "Casseopeia" is randomly thrown in as a worrying result of no more W's). But what is even more irritating than the uneven subject matter is the book's rhythm. Apparently it was more important to present lines of even length on the page than to structure them in a way that isn't tortuous to read. This book was very frustrating to read aloud to my son because the rhyming words didn't match up with the rhythm suggested by the line structure. We love books that rhyme, but this one was a huge disappointment. This book could have been very good with a better editor, but as it is it is just a pain in the neck.