A

The first moveable books were for adults, and instructional: anatomies for medical students; astronomical charts that showed the shifting of the spheres; Lullian circles, the early ancestor of Lyra’s alethiometer. Think of the family tree of books — in this branch, paper, not type, tells the story. The printed word seems tyrannical by comparison, endless black letters on endless pages, endlessly reproducible. Paper, glue, and physical imagination never stood a chance.

Marion Battaile’s ABC3D opens with a spread of rich black, no title page or copyright. In the center, a creamy letter A unfolds, perpendicular to the page and standing about an inch high. It’s substantial and sharp viewed straight on; hollow and fragile from below.

B

Bataille is a graphic designer and illustrator, and her vision of letters is about form, no pun intended. She limits the colors in her pop-up alphabet to rich black, creamy white, and a bright, deep red. She also limits herself to a mere handful of paper engineering techniques: fold-ups and fold-outs, pull-tabs, undercuts. This repetition is a platform and a vocabulary for two kinds of surprise and delight: the first, when a familiar technique appears in some new form, and the second, when she breaks ranks with a piece of cut-paper art, a translucent overlay, a mirror.

Moving through the alphabet, she shows us letters as she sees them — not as signifiers, but as stories told in shape. Marriages, divorces, personalities ranging from solid, even stolid, to playful to delicately complex. This is the power of a perfect design system: Bataille adds infinite variety to the letters we thought were a mere 26, a gorgeous profusion of invention, without ever letting the kite fly too far free.

The vertical bar of the B is a slash of slender red lines; the bowls emerge, dizzyingly, from the underlying page.

C/D

In How to Stop Time, Heroin From A to Z, Ann Marlowe complains of the “borrowed authority” of the alphabet, calling it “implacable” and comparing it to the comforting constraint of sonnets, blues lyrics, and Scrabble. That old argument? Constraint is what you, and your fear, make of it.

At a 90-degree angle, a red C half-opens across the page; at 180 degrees, the C flips, becoming the bowl of a capital D. Both letters seem amused by the trick.

E/F

The Greek epsilon is the origin of our capital E. Where did F come from? According to Bataille, it emerges from a simple reduction of its predecessor. According to historians, its origin is much more complicated, involving Phoenician and a bloodless merger between the Greek upsilon and digamma. Its sisters are U, V, W, and Y, not E at all! Coy F!

The base of the E slides behind a cut in the page, leaving the field to F.

G

Formally, pop-up books are known as “self-erecting.” Turn the page, pull a tab or string — act on two dimensions, and be rewarded with the addition of a third. This is magical and surprising in a way that “pop-up” captures, and “self-erecting” doesn’t.

Nor does “self-erecting” capture the relationship that the “pop-up” requires: these three-dimensional letterforms only move with the engine of a hand. The reader of a pop-up book doesn’t choose her own adventure, but she chooses the tenor of it: fast or slow, gentle or violent. She feels whether the paper is delicate or coarse, understands what it can take, watches it age with use. Like her, the paper is mortal, and every pop-up book becomes irreproducible over time.

G starts sideways — on its back, not its belly — then unfolds into a capital right-side-up, twice the original’s height, and suddenly serifed.

K

Swallow’s wings, kept quiet until they fly.

L

In preschool and kindergarten, the alphabet is still more powerful than social hierarchy. Attendance, seating, lines — how you’re named, rather than preference, dictates who you’ll partner with. Later, this will come to seem arbitrary, but is it more or less so than any other human system?

Later, it may come to seem comforting. It removes a certain strain you’ll discover in choosing a table in the school cafeteria, a seat for the semester, a “buddy” for field trips, and eventually who, if anyone, will hold your hand in the last hours of your life.

As the accordion page unfolds, an off-kilter L, a sharp-edged checkmark, springs solidly into place.

O/P/Q/R

Where most of us see letters, typographers see letterforms. Each line and curve, even whitespace, has a name: ascender, beak, counter. Some of these names are human in origin (eye, shoulder), some animal (tail), some mechanical (terminal, apex). These shapes make up letters, and their particulars make up typefaces and fonts — systems that balance function (can you read this?) with aesthetics (do you want to?) and even art (do these words look the way they feel?).

Paper engineering is also a game of forms. Volvelles, flaps, pull-tabs —all devices that change what we see on the page, using physical dimension to explore the conceptual. Skin flips back to show the musculature beneath; planets spin in relation to each other; paper shifts against paper to display the passage of time — playfully, or in deadly earnest.

By combining these two kinds of forms, Bataille shows us the muscle beneath the skin of the written word. Letters can be made beautiful, say calligraphy and typography. Letters are beautiful, says Bataille.

O and P are printed, simply, on the recto; the verso is a translucent sheet with two identical legs that, positioned just right, bring Q and R into view.

S

The alphabet song was first copyrighted by music publisher Charles Bradlee in 1835 … Wait, the alphabet song? Just the English-language version, the one that borrows from “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” — which borrows, in turn, from “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman”.

A favorite alternative to the American ending:

Now I know my ABCs/next time won’t you sing with me?

Is this one, suited to the British and Canadian “Zed”:

Sugar on your bread/eat it all up/before you are dead.

Red-and-white pinwheels spiral in the counters of S, like peppermints or a funhouse spinner.

T

Let's not talk about all the things to which we feed our time and attention. There are plenty of think-pieces already for that. Let's talk instead about opening a book that can break if you read it too quickly, a book whose pages bite against each other as you open and close them, a book where paper touches paper like skin against skin. Let's talk about a book of puzzles, not of language, but of shape and movement. A book that changes with each opening, that invites and conceals in the same fold.

How much of your time and attention would that book deserve?

U

For U, the paper is cut and folded into a shape that’s part gill, part feather —structured and curved, static and mobile. Why so much attention to this letter, over others? What did the shape of U suggest to Bataille, that she felt she had to capture it in so elaborate a design?

Against a black background, two white paper wings open straight up, with a sweep of delicate paper threads forming the curve beneath. Even after careful consideration, the engineering of it is a mystery.

Z

Contrariwise, Z is one of the simplest letters in the book by looks, a double scissor of white leaning away from the black page, leaving darkness for us to explore alone.

Following the sculptural U, the tricolor X and Y, the mirrored W, Z asks for quiet consideration. The letter is plain, but its construction is obscure — is there one tab, or more? In an interview, Bataille says it was the most difficult letter to engineer.

If Bataille thought of this as a finale, it is provoking — as if the last firework were a single shooting star, going off with an almost inaudible “pop,” then spreading across the sky after the crowd has looked away.

A lonely letter, Z, rarely used, unaccompanied on one side, requiring some persistence to reach. But wait. Between M and O, there was a match for Z. Many, many pages away, but in distance less than an inch.

On the last spread, a tab of paper anchored to the right pulls Z upright. Then, the book closes — and the final letter goes flat.