Seven Secret Alphabets

Anthony Earnshaw's Seven Secret Alpha- bets spells out an alternative to the triumph of Universal Standardization. Never have the letters of the alphabet been more ingeniously portrayed. A half-dressed girl tied to a railway line becomes A; the entwined tentacles of a diver and an octopus make B; an arc of false teeth form C; a voodoo doll stuck with pins becomes K; two pairs of empty but self-supporting trousers shape M; the upraised arms of a cornered burglar make Y. Each picture is a matchless miniature on its own - witty, dramatic or macabre and each alphabet is more breath- takingly original than the next. Readers of Musrum and Wintersol will recognize in Seven Secret Alphabets an important source of reference, for here displayed are the surrealist humour and visionary draftsmanship that distinguished those two earlier works. As a book of pictures or a visual joke book, Seven Secret Alphabets is outstanding; as a feat the imagination, it is incomparable. Anthony Earnshaw was born in Ilkley in Yorkshire in 1924 but moved to Leeds at the age of ten. At one time a crane-driver, he taught himself to paint while moving from one factory job to another and was greatly encouraged by another Yorkshire painter, Patrick Hughes, who persuaded him to hol his first one-man show. He now teaches art at the Leeds Polytechnic and the Bradford College of Art. In 1968 he published in association with the Methodist minister, Eric Thacker, a brilliant surrealist fantasy in words and pictures called Musrum. At that time Anthony Earnshaw told George Melly in an interview: 'The book may well be a fantasy. If it is, it's not one that offers an escape from the world. For Eric, as for me, reality has always contained every possible and every impossible thing.' Melly himself commented: 'This is an encouraging declaration of faith. At a time when "pop" appears to be chasing its own tail in gestures of increasing desperate triviality, two men are prepared to reassert their faith in the marvellous.' Three years later, Thacker and Earnshaw published a follow-up, Winter- sol, and embarked on a weekly cartoon strip in The Times Educational Supple- ment which chronicled the adventures of Wokker, a fabulous wheeled bird. Illustrated with 182 illustrations, printed in various colours, by Earnshaw, a master of surrealism.