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 years after his ashes were scattered before people might have found — innocuous amongst the shelves of their local libraries — that strange biscript edition of Androcles and the Lion: its pages now creamed, dried and softened with age; every other page inscrutable and seemingly printed with tinned spaghetti. Shavian.

Shavian was to be an ideal alphabet: easier to read, write and print and accurately reflecting speech. It is a rare example not only of a new writing system, but of one that was adapted for 20th-century printing technology. …