📚 The Alphabet

30 works · ordered by editions in print

One sound, one mark: the Phoenician inheritance, letter-forms, and the teaching tradition that starts here.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject alphabet in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Title	Author	First published	Editions
The art of illuminating	W. R. Tymms	1860	23
The 26 letters	Oscar Ogg	1948	18
Eating the Alphabet	Lois Ehlert	1989	15
1100 words you need to know	Murray Bromberg	1971	12
ABC	John Burningham	1944	10
Alphabatics	Suse MacDonald	1986	10
Best word book ever	Richard Scarry	1963	9
Designs for Coloring	Ruth Heller	1976	9
Quentin Blake's ABC	Quentin Blake	1989	9
ABC's of space	Isaac Asimov	1969	8
Paddington's ABC	Michael Bond	1990	8
Calligraphy	Caroline Young	1990	8
Alphabets & ornaments	Ernst Lehner	1952	7
The Ocean Alphabet Book	Jerry Pallotta	1986	7
Alpha beta	John Man	2000	7
S Is For Show Me	Judy Young	2001	7
Firefighters from A to Z	Chris L. Demarest	2000	6
P is for Piñata	Tony Johnston	2008	6
The Bird Alphabet Book	Jerry Pallotta	1987	5
J'apprends l'alphabet en quatre langues	Ruth Brown	1991	5
M is for mitten	Annie Appleford	1999	5
V is for volunteer	Michael Shoulders	2001	5
C is for centennial	Louise Doak Whitney	2002	5
M Is For Maple Syrup	Cynthia Furlong Reynolds	2002	5
G is for Grand Canyon	Barbara Gowan	2002	5
G is for Garden State	Eileen Cameron	2004	5
P is for Peace Garden	Roxane B. Salonen	2005	5
A is for aloha	U'ilani Goldsberry	2005	5
M Is for Meow	Helen L. Wilbur	2006	5
Pantographia	Edmund Fry	1799	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

The American Civil War The Amish The Arctic The Atmosphere The Aztecs The Bagpipe

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.