Once upon an alphabet

A GOOD ALPHABET book is like a raucous playroom for language, persuading children to internalize the ABCs by turning the letters into toys. Rhymes and rhythm, metaphor and simile, alliteration, assonance and consonance - the ABC book's verbal gymnastics match the alphabet's inherently visual nature, making the genre not just a feast for young readers but a rewarding medium for illustrators and designers too. Five new ABC books revel in that word and image play. With its dark red and sepia tones, the punningly titled "Alphabetabum" evokes a lost world of European composition books, exotic passports, vintage photo albums and old-school primers. It addresses children and nostalgic adult readers alike, with a rhyming verse for each letter accompanied by a 19th- or early-20th-century studio photo or carte de visite. Some readers might find something disturbing about this appropriation for amusement of found images of real people from the past. Take the cover image, of a small girl in a short dress with a sash, costumed for a dance performance, perhaps, looking out at the camera with a pleased smile, hands behind her back. Inside, the rhyme for A calls her "Awkward Agnes Alexandra" who "shows her ample ankles/although her knees are grander." I want to protest for her sake that there's nothing amiss about her ankles in their white socks. Still, children, like adults, might enjoy the chance to meet the eyes of this "Agnes" or that "Margo" gazing back at us from a vanished century. Vintage photos, like our own early reading memories, are inevitably laced with a sense of lost time. In "Alphabetabum," the rhymes infuse the letters with affect, reminding us of that other use we make of the alphabet: bringing order to random accumulations - such as old photos of strangers - that can elicit hard-to-define emotions. (One hopes that someone will claim some of these children as ancestors!) "Once Upon an Alphabet," by Oliver Jeffers ("How to Catch a Star," "The Day the Crayons Quit"), offers "short stories for all the letters," a time-honored approach to the genre, though Jeffers uses mostly prose rather than the usual all-rhyme. The letters appear as colorful outsize hand-drawn capitals on the "title page" of each story. For A, we get "An Astronaut," in bright teal on black. A little white figure stares up, daunted, at the giant letter; as we learn, he's afraid of heights. Others, recalling Edward Gorey's wicked "The Gashlycrumb Times," fare even less well than the astronaut. Poor Helen who lives in H's "half a house" rolls out of bed into the sea one morning; T's "terrible typewriter" conjures a typist-eating monster. C's cup, which dreams of living on the windowsill, falls and breaks in the leap from the cupboard. In the generous spirit of this book, though, O's octopus and owl, who "search for problems," glue it back together. The cup ends up broken again in the margins of the typewriter story, but children will enjoy detecting such morsels that trail through the pages. Michaël Escoffier and Kris Di Giacomo innovate on the ABC genre in "Take Away the A" by reminding us, like the loftiest deconstructionists, that language is built around trivial and arbitrary distinctions that can mark vast differences. One small change and everything changes: "Without the A," they show us, "the Beast is the Best." As profound and stimulating as adults might find the conceit, everything about this attractive book warmly addresses a child. Di Giacomo's palimpsest-like illustrations featuring appealing animal protagonists are their own reward. A little white rat threads its way through, its tiny reaction shots standing in for the child reader's. Wolves, witches, a fiddling cat and seven dwarves dance across the pages, gesturing to the wealth of children's literature beyond the ABCs. With rereading and maturing, young readers will discover the jokes gradually, if they don't at first go. All alphabet books require mastery of the letters in order to read them, but this one manages that paradox with genius. the aggressively hip "Alphabetics" mostly sticks to a conventional alphabet-book formula, with alliterative phrases on the left page and a full-page image on the right of each spread. Dawid Ryski's Boteroesque figures, with huge bodies and tiny heads and limbs, in a retro palette heavy on teal, gold and russet, illustrate the pointedly surreal free verses: "Atticus the altruistic astronaut/admires an ascending apple/while aviating through an anti-gravity abyss." (A is for astronaut these days, and yet inevitably that old apple still floats into view.) The verses rely on so many obscure words that the book includes a glossary, where you can look up "penny-farthing" (an early bicycle) and "lucha libre" (Mexican freestyle wrestling). You can also look up "carnie" and find the unkind characterization that carnival workers "frequently happen to be missing teeth." And, perhaps in keeping with its retro references to things like the jitterbug and mid-20th-century camera brands, elsewhere there's an incongruous image of headdress-wearing Indians. The Brooklyn/Portland artisanal aesthetic - there are "geek-chic glasses," "fro yo" and "quinoa" - might attract certain parents, and the alliterative verses are sometimes zingy, but it verges on amateurism in places, including some typos. Squarely in the primary-color, animal-intense tradition of the modern ABC book, Elizabeth Schoonmaker's "Square Cat ABC" brings back the orange kitty Eula from "Square Cat," in what is, yes, a lovely square book. A brilliant full-page red A for "Amazing" features a blue-and-pink mouse sliding down the leg of the letter into the next page, where she or he befriends the square cat, who's digging in her garden. Fans of "Square Cat" will recognize the theme of friendship's embrace of difference, as Eula introduces the frightened mouse to her pal the porcupine. Schoonmaker's page-filling red letters and bright watercolors enhance the short and sweet story meant for the youngest readers, which associates the letters with everyday words that a child might say: "Whoa," "Stop," "Hooray." When Eula persists in finding spinach "extremely Yucky," the friendly mouse offers her "Zucchini, perhaps?" Touches like that give "Square Cat ABC" the makings of a classic: Its substance comes from wearing its visual and verbal cleverness so lightly. PATRICIA CRAIN, a professor of English at New York University, is the author of "The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America From 'The New England Primer' to 'The Scarlet Letter.'"

With wry humor, equally droll ink illustrations, and a solid dose of alliteration, Jeffers (the Hueys series) creates delightful mini-narratives for each letter of the alphabet. In the B story, "Burning a Bridge," the antagonistic relationship between neighbors Bernard and Bob reaches a breaking point: "But Bob learned an important lesson that day" after he burns down the bridge separating their homes-and traps himself on Bernard's side. In addition to the rampant alliteration in the stories and poems ("Mary is made of matter./ So is her mother./ And her mother's moose"), Jeffers's illustrations are full of unnamed people and objects that correspond to each letter, providing opportunities for interactive reading. Grim touches appear here and there-because half of Helen's house fell into the sea, getting up on the wrong side of the bed proves disastrous-but the overall mood is one of playful mischief. One thing is certain: if Jeffers's determined problem-solving duo, Owl and Octopus-who pop up throughout, rescuing drowning cucumbers and recovering stolen x-ray glasses-don't get to headline future books of their own, it'll be downright criminal. Ages 3-5. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.