Back to School - Easy as ABC

Sonia Delaunay, Alphabet (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972)
Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor; Effie Lee Morris Historical Collection of Children's Literature, SFPL

Sonia Delaunay’s stunning Alphabet Book invites every child to participate in the naming and shaping of letters. Color and rhyme form an unforgettable look at the alphabet—a gift to the young reader in all of us.

Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was an original. She was an innovator, an inventor, a fabricator, an artificer. She made things, and she made things happen. By instinct she was a passionate adept of the avant-garde, and yet the traditionally pure, unmodulated colors of her remembered childhood in the Ukraine are everywhere visible in her work. She was aesthetically uncompromising, but she felt at home in many worlds: the commercial, the theatrical, the literary, the social. She was in the forefront of cultural developments throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and her influence lives on far beyond her own life —Stanley Baron, Sonia Delaunay: The Life of an Artist (1995).

Many more alphabet books may be found throughout the library’s collections. Books about the life and work of Sonia Delaunay may be found in the Art, Music, & Recreation Center, Fourth Floor, Main Library. Readers interested in the history of letters, beautiful handwriting, typography and printers’ specimens will find a wealth of material in the Book Arts & Special Collections Center, Sixth Floor, Main Library. Come visit!