Mystery ABC Book

Today I took an interesting question from a patron. A mother was in the library and noticed our display of alphabet books, which reminded her of a book she had read with her oldest daughter years ago. She said that the book was wonderful because it only had one letter on each page and the whole thing was done in bright primary colors. She also made a point of mentioning that the letters themselves were large but unembellished - no fancy fonts, no letters created by objects, etc. We quickly established that the book she was remembering was not currently on display.

Well, there are a lot of alphabet books in the library so I knew this would be a challenging search. Nothing immediately sprang to mind so I turned to my good friend Novelist for help. This database (available at many public libraries across the country and provided for all Wisconsin residents through BadgerLink) is a wonderful resource for questions like this where a patron remembers a few details from a book but not the title or author. I typed "alphabet, one letter per page" into the search bar and got a whole list of possible books.

Fortunately the book we were looking for was only the second book on the list of results. We were also lucky enough to find the book was on the shelf! The book we were searching for turned out to be Max's ABC by Rosemary Wells. In this story Max's ants escape from their ant farm. Chaos ensues until his sister Ruby comes to the rescue. Each page features a different letter of the alphabet drawn in large, bright, plain type in the illustration and includes a number of alliterative words that move the story along and reinforce the letter's sound. While perhaps not what I would describe as primary, the colors used to illustrate the letters and the backgrounds are definitely bright and bold.

Both Mom and her oldest daughter were able to confirm that this was the book they remembered after leafing through a few pages. They decided to take the story home with them to share with a younger sibling.

Looking for more great alphabet books? Here are a few others that were featured in our book display:

LMNO Peas by Keith Baker
Bad Kitty by Nick Bruel
Alphabet Under Construction by Denise Flemming
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr.
Superhero ABC by Bob McLeod
Apple Pie ABC by Alison Murray
A Isn't for Fox: An Isn't Alphabet by Wendy K. Ulmer