A, B, SEE!

Shapes and Things, Tans Hoban's first book, invited us to identify by their shapes the things pictured in photograms (and experience them as material form dematerialized). Here, we have the alphabet with one letter at a time printed large—and the objects on the page, as you may have guessed, all begin with that letter. It doesn't take from A (asparagus, apple, abacus, arrow. . .) to B to catch on; the self-reinforcing scheme is just the thing to build up small egos; the objects are mostly recognizable at age three or four (abacus is perhaps the most out-of-the-way)—or, in a few exceptional instances, so visually intriguing (a crab, a grater) that children will want to know what they are. And, though a page of diverse objects is the norm, there are other solutions too: most ingeniously, a page of question marks for the letter Q; three umbrellas in a row for U—and on the facing page, a single vase for V. Or, the enormously effective single, half-open zipper for Z. One might even become newly aware, because of the way the zipper intersects with the Z on that last page, that the enlarged letter has proceeded through the alphabet apace. Altogether: a knockout.