Re: OT Dr. Magel's alphabet book (was Re: A prioi vs. A posteriori ?

In a message dated Wed, 5 Feb 2003 19:36:59 -0500, Roger Mills parisen:

>>James Landau wrote:
>>_Dr. Moggle's Alphabet Challenge_ was a book by John Magel published in 
1985. It 
>>told as a poem a story about being taken through the alphabet in a dream 
state by 
>>an elf named Trapisset, being the chosen one on a quest to find all the 
words. On 
>>each left page was the story continued, told in rhyme, and on each right 
page were
>>full-page pictures, containing objects and organisms beginning with a 
letter of the 
>>alphabet, with the idea being to identify all 1,000 words illustrated 
throughout the 
>>book. The book was at the center of a big contest at the time, and amidst 
all its 
>>spiritual themes about "the quest", it announced that there were two words 
in the 
>>book that were both illustrated, and spelled out by name in the pictures. 
The big 
>>prize would be given to the entrant who wrote in and identified both words, 
and if 
>>more than one had figured it out, to the one who explained the most 
eloquently in 
>>an essay just what "the significance" of those two words were. For all the 
hype, I 
>>never did hear what became of the contest, or who their much-anticipated 
winner 
>>was.
>
>That sounds very familiar (but not quite the same, certainly not the 
title).....Back 
>around that same time I got an Alphabet-challenge book, but I dont recall 
any
>poems/elf/story line, nothing of a quest....Just 26 extremely intricate, 
amusing and
>sometimes lovely paintings (N in particular, the theme was night) chock full 
of 
>things, all beginning with the given letter....I seem to recall ít came with 
a sort-of 
>answer booklet that listed all the items but tons of non-items too, so you 
couldn't 
>be sure. Again, there was a contest involved, and again, I don't know who 
won, as I 
>didn't enter. I started doing it, but got depressed and stopped when I 
didn't get as 
>far as I thought I should. You needed a f**ing magnifying glass to find the 
amonite.. 

 Could this be _The Ultimate Alphabet_? Now that you mention it, I remember 
that only a few years later there came out a book called _The Ultimate 
Alphabet_, whose author was named Mike (I think his last name was Wilks or 
Willis or something), that also had a contest around it. It also had a 
painting for every letter, full of items beginning with it, but the contest 
revolved around finding every word hidden in the pictures, not about 
explaining the mystical significance of a certain two words like Magel's 
contest did. I didn't hear about the outcome of that contest either. While 
Magel's book had only 1,000 words illustrated (the theme was more about that 
lifelong dream of return to childhood, with the deep, deep Lucasian mythos of 
The Quest than about illustrating as many words as possible), _The Ultimate 
Alphabet_ had more than 600 words for the letter S alone. Unlike Dr. "Maggel" 
(1985), which seemed to still have some of the lingering spirit of the 
seventies in its spirituality, with all the funky elf shit, _The Ultimate 
Alphabet_, published a little later, had an aura of new-wave style eighties 
scientificness and modern cosmopolitanity to it, with a 
Reagan-upbeat-global-economy all-you-can-eat bounty of plenty of words from 
each letter to enjoy.

 Amazingly, around the same time as the other two, a third book devoted to 
alphabetic paintings came out, called _Animalia_. My sister had that one. It 
showed a Herman-Miller-like love of painting animals. It made a huge splash 
at the time with nothing but acclaim and its 26 paintings were often 
reproduced and posted up around libraries and art clinics. I still find the 
_Animalia_ paintings up somewhere every now and then. How was it that three 
books with the idea of alphabetically-themed paintings came out in the same 
frame of time?

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