Shavian (3/3): typographic implementation

Kingsley Read, ‘Androcles and the Lion’ and the final results of the G.B. Shaw’s campaign to replace Latin with a new alphabet

Twelve years after George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, a reader could open a new edition of his play Androcles and the Lion and discover a chimaera. The righthand pages of the book take the expected form: the English language is embodied by a block of the familiar Latin alphabet…

Shavian (2/3): the development

How Kingsley Read built a writing system to match George Bernard Shaw’s alphabetic utopia

Shavian (1/3): origins

The background of the alphabetic utopia theorised by G.B. Shaw, between spelling and phonetic reform of the English language

By the time that his vision of a new alphabet for the English language had been realised and printed, George Bernard Shaw was dead. A Nobel-winning playwright, critic and polemicist, he spent half a century exasperated by how English was written and campaigning for its reform. It would be twelve…

Shavian (3/3): typographic implementation

Kingsley Read, ‘Androcles and the Lion’ and the final results of the G.B. Shaw’s campaign to replace Latin with a new alphabet

Shavian (2/3): the development

How Kingsley Read built a writing system to match George Bernard Shaw’s alphabetic utopia

Shavian (1/3): origins

The background of the alphabetic utopia theorised by G.B. Shaw, between spelling and phonetic reform of the English language

Leo Philp