So with our Butterfly-in-Chief having launched her countdown of the Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time, we figured our Head Alien – that’s me! – needed a series to motivate some more regular contributions to the stacks as well. So where she’s started something music and numerical, I’ve chosen something book and alphabetical: a tour of my collection of alphabet books, alphabetically by title.

I’ve written more broadly before about this collection – most notably in these posts about “Alphabetizing your ABCs” and “Starting with our ABCs” – as well as otherwise randomly on the topic of alphabet books. But I realized I haven’t ever explored my alphabetica collection in any real depth, a collection that as of the publication of this post includes 208 books. They’re mostly alphabet books, based around a huge variety of themes, as well as some “alphabet-adjacent” acquisitions that I’ll share in due time.

But for right now, we begin at the beginning with what, as it happens, might actually also be the very first alphabet book I ever owned: A Apple Pie by illustrators Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone.

So many reasons why I was delighted that this happened to be the book to start this new series, not the least of which is that “pie” is a homonym of my name. So in the same way that Pi Day has thusly been claimed as my family holiday, so too does this book resonate at an extra level for me, and has for my whole life.

Published by Dean & Son Ltd. in 1973, this book has been with me since my childhood, and was effectively the catalyst for my alphabetica collection. Along with my overall fascination with language and words, I think having this book as a favourite in my collection primed me to notice other alphabet books out in the wild, which I eventually began to acquire and shelve alongside.

Then when it came time to organize my growing collection, this book also presented one of my first challenges.

A Apple Pie has also been referenced and catalogued under alternate titles such as A apple pie b bit it, Apple Pie ABC, ABC Apple Pie, and just plain Apple Pie. This might otherwise be a rather pedantic point to raise, but since we are talking about alphabet books and alphabetization, the choice of what title to adopt turns out to be rather on point since it’s the only reason this book is first on our shelves now and therefore first in this series.

If we went by the cover image, we could well argue that the title could or should be Apple Pie or Apple Pie ABC or ABC Apple Pie. But using any of these would have bumped this book much further down the alphabetical order. In fact that’s exactly what happened in my first attempt, when my question of this book was “And what the heck even is the proper title for this one?”

Meanwhile A apple pie b bit it, while rather clunky, is technically correct, if we were to go by the proper librarianship cataloguing practice of using the information as it exists on the copyright page…

That said, since we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library are not quite as official SOP in our cataloguing practices, we eventually chose to go in a different direction. Firstly there’s an argument to be made that this initial page spread is less a copyright page than it is the actual first content page of the book, since the next page immediately goes to “C cut it.”

And our ‘secondly’ is a very practical one. Instead of anything drawn from the cover or “copyright” page, we opted to go with the title as it appears on the spine of the book, basically for the reason of finding it more easily when scanning the shelves after one might have looked it up in our catalogue…

Now that all said, I think the actual ‘proper’ title for this book should be Apple Pie ABC since the textual content is essentially that of a traditional English alphabet rhyme of the same name that first appeared way back in the 1700s. Our only credited creators for this book, Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, were twin sisters who became popular as book illustrators in the 1950s. I’m guessing that the choice of a well-known alphabet rhyme as base text was simply a convenient (and likely zero cost) excuse to feature their artwork.

And what spectacular artwork it is, definitely of the period but full of personality and detail. Here are just a few of my favourites.

And one more sample, but for the additional purpose of introducing a review element that I plan to include throughout my alphabetica series, what our Butterfly-in-Chief has so beautifully named “the Creative Liberties.” A Apple Pie includes just one, and as it turns out it’s the usual suspect…

Well, it might be a cheat but in the world of alphabet books it’s perhaps to be as expected as pie. As we continue this series there will be a lot of Creative Liberties for me to share with you, dear patron!

But until then, happy reading of all your own ABCs and all the myriad combinations thereof!

– Winston

Beginning with A Apple Pie

And now, time for something completely different…