Michael Rosen. Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story. London, John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2013.

Tracing modern letter shapes to ancient Phoenician pictograms for everyday objects and revealing the faux archaic 'ye' to be a memory of the Old English letter 'thorn', writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen shows the alphabet to be a rich source of stories and curiosities as he explores how we arrived at our 26 letters. There are discussions of lost letters and accents, oddities of pronunciation and spelling, and digressions on such topics as typewriters and the psychology of typefaces.