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.

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