"How on Earth did we fix upon our twenty-six letters, what do they mean, and how did we come to write them down in the first place? Michael Rosen takes you on an ... adventure through the histiory of the alphabet in twenty six ... chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and fascinating facts. Starting with the mysterious Phoenicians and ho sounds first came to be written down, he races on to show how nonsense poems work, pins down the strange story of OK, traces our five lost letteers and tackles the tyranny of spelling ... His heroes of the alphabet range from Edward Lear to Phyllis Pearsall (the inventor of the A-Z), and from the two scribes of Beowulf to rappers ... "--Book jacket.