Vertiginous Accounts: Travels in the Air (1871 edition)

Peckish Alphabetics: The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye (ca. 1793–1796)

American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century

Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799)

A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860)

Indian Sign Talk (1893)

Punctuation Personified (1824)

Jan Luyken’s Frontispiece for Osteologia (1680)

Knowledge by the Pound: The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread (1768)

William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890)

Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate

Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880)

Glossary of Censored Words from a 1919 Treatise on Love

The Cubies’ ABC (1913)

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843)

The Language of Flowers: An Alphabet of Floral Emblems (1857)

X is for...

Jan van Kessel’s Signature of Caterpillars and Snakes (1657)

Medieval Pattern Poems of Rabanus Maurus (9th Century)

Alice’s Adventures in Shorthand (1919)

Robert Fludd’s Memory Tricks (1617)

Nineteenth-Century Textspeak

Mnemonic Alphabet of Jacobus Publicius (1482)

Letters to Dead Authors (1886)