In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–69), we are told how “Demi learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels.” Composed across more than half a millennium, the images gathered below also unite contortion and composition, and seem to celebrate the innate humanness of writing, which tops the list of qualities that distinguish our dear species most distinctly from our fellow animals.

Typographical characters have long had an affinity with the character and shape of the human body. As Peter John Brownlee has discussed, geometer Luca Pacioli, engraver Geoffroy Tory, and other late Renaissance figures “utilized the human anatomy as scaffolding on which to form properly proportioned letters”. We find such scaffolding in Peter Flötner’s woodcut Menschenalphabet (1534), where the artist’s own body is often reworked into elegantly balanced letters. Later instances of the embodied alphabet depart from Renaissance celebrations of humanism toward subtle commentary on the character-forming qualities of pedagogy. The Comical Hotch Potch, or the Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master (published in Britain in 1782 and later reproduced in 1812 by Philadelphia printer James Webster), for instance, features obsequious men striving to affect the alphabet: “He first finds a way, To form a great A”, “L sits him down easy, And hopes for to please ye”, “To please every sex, I am forming an X”.

With the advent of photography, the conceit gained new life. A photo series of human letters appeared in an 1897 article by William G. FitzGerald for The Strand Magazine. “The idea of building up each letter of the alphabet and each figure from 1 to 0 out of the bodies of human beings is an absolutely unique ‘notion.’”, he writes, and takes a page from Alcott’s book: “Our human alphabet may also suggest to hard-worked teachers of infants a novel way of imparting to little ones their letters”. As the image gallery below demonstrates, the claim of being an absolutely unique notion is certifiably untrue, but this “real” human alphabet is indeed bulkier, for there are living bodies at play. FitzGerald bemoans the clunkiness of E: “It is rather a pity that Mr. Harry Delevine’s body is so prominent, thereby making the upper part of the letter unduly thick. But what would you [do]? It was quite unavoidable.”