A is for Art by Stephen Johnson

So, I LOVE picture books and have read a lot of them while I was working on my dissertation. We have the largest collection of international children's books in the country here on the ground floor of our college, so all of my classes had lots of opportunities for browsing great picture books. I particularly like multicultural books (my dissertation was on bilingual books from small presses), books about art, ABC books, and books with awesome artwork. A Is for Art: An Abstract Alphabet is an incredible alphabet book like none I've ever seen before. Johnson, who is a fantastic artist, doesn't portray apples and zebras -- each letter is a painting that uses that letter in really creative ways. For example, the letter F is a painting of "Fourteen hundred and fifty-five fake French fries were flipped, flicked, and flung onto a full-size field of faint fuchsia." WOW! I can't imagine how he thought up all these pieces, much less created them. Johnson also wrote Alphabet City, where he created paintings of normal city scenes that contained letters hidden in them.