Young Youth Year

         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.  Whatever you’re interested in, someone’s probably blogging on it, so start reading — you’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

        Today’s first alphabet is the water-themed series of linocuts by Sarah Young.  Her Y is Yabby, which I had to look up.  It’s an Australian crayfish.  I love the wide variety of subjects Young chooses, from tropical to arctic, from modern to 

mythological, from natural to technological, but all related to bodies of water.  I had a tough time picking favorites since I like a lot of these, but I went with H for Harbour and J for Jellyfish.  You can also see her K back in a previous year’s A to Z post, and I expect that some of her pieces with mythological beings may  yet show up some time in the future.

        Then there’s Youths’ Battledoor from the mid-nineteenth century.  Battledoor (more often spelled battledore) is another word I didn’t know before encountering it during 2020’s A to Z theme of Nursery Rhymes.  It originally meant a bat or paddle used for various crafts and jobs including laundry, glassworking, and baking (like a pizza peel).  It then came to be applied to a sort of very simple alphabet or primer printed on a paddle so that it was durable and easy for young children to hold when studying.  

The meaning was then extended further to any short, simple primer, which is how it’s used in the title of this little alphabet booklet.  Its Y is indeed a Youth, and in case you’re wondering what he’s doing, he’s playing with a whipping top.  For additional letters I’ve chosen the delightfully self-referential Book for B, and the handsome Unicorn at U.

        Our Year alphabets are actually a series of four books, each of which includes an entire alphabet of acrostics for one season.  The acrostics are by Steven Schnur and are interesting in including some very different sorts of words from most of the other 

alphabets.  There are verbs, abstract nouns, and even adjectives.  But of course I’m really here for the illustrations, which are linoleum block prints painted with watercolors by Leslie Evans.  (I assume that’s the same artist who did the Vanishing Wildlife alphabet back at V.)  Not surprisingly, my favorites are the ones that give a little more emphasis to the carving, and rely less on the paint.  Because we’ve got four entire alphabets here, I’m only sharing the Y’s for Summer (Yacht) and Winter (Yearn).  That gives me a little more room to share one favorite from each of the four season’s alphabets.  In Spring X is for X-ing, Summer’s D is Daisy, in Autumn B is for Barn, and in Winter A is for Awake.  (For another alphabet with a year theme, also remember Bowen’s Northwoods Alphabet back at N.)

        The moral of Y is that although youth may be wasted on the young, don’t yearn for yesterday.

        Riddle of the day: which letters will give you the best advice?

        So, what’s your favorite month or season of the year?

[Pictures: Yabby, Harbour, Jellyfish, linocuts by Sarah Young, (Images from sarah-young.co.uk);

Youth, Book, Unicorn, hand-colored woodcuts from Youth’s Battledoor, 1828-43 (Images from University of Washington);

Yacht, Yearn, hand-colored linoleum block prints by Leslie Evans;

X-ing, Daisy, Barn, Awake, hand-colored linoleum block prints by Leslie Evans from SPRING: An Alphabet Acrostic by Steven Schnur, 1999; SUMMER by Schnur, 2001; AUTUMN by Schnur, 1997; WINTER by Schnur, 2002.]