Xylographer MarX

         Welcome to the April A to Z Blog Challenge!  My theme this year is Relief Printed Alphabet Squared, an alphabet of alphabets illustrated with relief block prints.  Find the master list of participating blogs here, and go around and see how many of my fellow bloggers have had to cheat to find an X!

        Xylography is a fancy word from Greek roots for wood block printing.  Therefore most of the alphabets featured this entire month are technically alphabets of xylography, but today I have for you an alphabet in which the X is for Xylographer.  William Nicholson’s alphabet of people includes everyone from a beggar to a countess.  (It was also made in two versions: one in which the Executioner and Toper were replaced with more child-appropriate Earl and Trumpeter.)  At any rate, however, I have for you in addition to the X, a Milkmaid for M, and you can revisit the U which I posted twelve years ago.  (Goodness gracious, I’ve been blogging a while!)

        Today’s other featured alphabet is yet again animals, this time by Enid MarX.  Given that I cheated in counting MarX for X, I guess I shouldn’t really complain that her X is for frog - for the shape of it, not the word, as the little couplet of text that goes with the picture explains.  I don’t really like the colors applied to the frog, but those appear to have been done by a different artist who put together a book of her alphabet posthumously, so I don’t hold it against her.  I’ve given you an extra helping of favorites from this alphabet, including M (Monkey), A (Anteater), and J (Jaguar).  I like Marx’s playful style a lot (even if the frog’s colors are perhaps a little too playful for me).

        Well, that’s about it for X.  If you crave more X-citement you can go read a previous post in which I shared the X strategies of a number of the alphabets that have already shown up in this A to Z Challenge.  (You will already have seen that post if you’ve followed previous links to find more letters from the alphabets in question.)  That post also includes one of my 

favorite morals, which is drawn from the difficulty of finding X’s for alphabets.  So I can’t do better today than to repeat: 

These verses teach a clever child to find

Excuse for doing all that he’s inclined.

(For purposes of the challenge we should probably spell it X-cuse!)

        And also, Fall IX times, stand up X times.

        So, in all our various alphabets so far we’ve seen people categorized in many different ways: where they live (B, E, J), what job they do (C, E, F, H, J, K, L, P, Q, T, X), their social class (E, G, H, K, L, Q), their familial relationship (F, M, U, W), their religion (U), their age (I, Y)…  If you were to be memorialized in an alphabet, what word would you choose to represent?

[Pictures: Xylographer, Milkmaid, hand-colored wood block prints by William Nicholson from An Alphabet, 1899 (Images from Wikimedia Commons);

X, Monkey, Anteater, Jaguar, wood block prints by Enid Marx from Marco’s Animal Alphabet, 1979 (Images from the saleroom and Books-on-Books).]