ALPHABET WORLD
By
Cleverly and simply done with colored inks on transparent paper over photographs, this invites a child to see letter forms in everyday shapes: a wrought-iron curlicue is a C, the handle of a mug a D, the profile of a hanging traffic light an E, and so on. Some of it is pretty arbitrary, some of it is ingenious, and all of it amounts to the kind of instructive Plaything labeled Creative. We would call it mechanical except for the design of the book but some children will take pleasure in it and profit from it.