A B See
Next on the alphabet book shelf is the first of many board books, not surprising since the expected target audience for such books is often small readers. This one is a beautiful book of illustrations and text by Elizabeth Doyle called A B See…
The gorgeous cover reveals the collage-style artwork that fill this book, with the added touch of the title being embossed on the cover. It’s a nice heavy book and already fun to just pull off the shelf. But as soon as you open it, it reveals each letter as a colourful assembly of individual drawings, each individually embossed for added texture, all beautifully presented in the shape of the letter in question against an ample white background.
The accompanying text tells one story from the illustration — “Alligator admires an apple” (with an ‘A’ verb snuck in for good measure!) – but the illustration itself contains multiple other ‘A’ words to discover. To support that discovery, A B See also includes a feature often found in this kind of alphabet book, an extended vocabulary list at the end of the book.
So there are in fact (at least) 32 words beginning with the letter A in the illustration of the A!
This format also means A B See has a built in workaround for the “Creative Liberties” challenge, with quails and x-rays being relatively easy to incorporate, along with extended vocabularies.
All in all it’s one of the most holistically well-done alphabet books in the collection… art, layout, text, format.
Next time, something a bit more niche… but until then, happy reading!
– Winston
This post is part of a series by our Alien-in-Chief: a tour of his collection of alphabet books, alphabetically by title. You can find them all under the tag ABCs, but if you’re looking for a place to start, we invite you to check out “Alphabetizing your ABCs” and “Starting with our ABCs” for an introduction to the collection. Happy reading!
