Featured on PDR in the collection The Human Alphabet

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.