Get the latest tech news

The Human Alphabet

Collection of alphabets in which the letterforms are comprised of the twists and turns of the human body.

In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women(1868–69), we are told how “Demi learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels.” Composed across more than half a millennium, the images gathered below also unite contortion and composition, and seem to celebrate the innate humanness of writing, which tops the list of qualities that distinguish our dear species most distinctly from our fellow animals. As Peter John Brownlee has discussed, geometer Luca Pacioli, engraver Geoffroy Tory, and other late Renaissance figures “utilized the human anatomy as scaffolding on which to form properly proportioned letters”. As the image gallery below demonstrates, the claim of being an absolutely unique notion is certifiably untrue, but this “real” human alphabet is indeed bulkier, for there are living bodies at play.

Get the Android app