-40 easy-to-stitch alphabet and sampler designs in cross stitch and other counted techniques-Features celebratory projects for births, weddings, and Christmas-Attractive and decorative ideas for using single initials -Superb color photographs and easy-to-read charts

For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedia of American Folk Art web site. This is the first comprehensive, scholarly study of a most fascinating aspect of American history and culture. Generously illustrated with both black and white and full-color photos, this A-Z encyclopedia covers every aspect of American folk art, encompassing not only painting, but also sculpture, basketry, ceramics, quilts, furniture, toys, beadwork, and more, including both famous and lesser-known genres. Containing more than 600 articles, this unique reference considers individual artists, schools, artistic, ethnic, and religious traditions, and heroes who have inspired folk art. An incomparable resource for general readers, students, and specialists, it will become essential for anyone researching American art, culture, and social history.

The English language is a fascinating subject and thanks to circumstances in history has possibly travelled the globe more than any other. The very basis of the written language is in the letters used to form words, and this book examines every aspect of the alphabet available for writing English, from the formation of letters to their use in words. Each and every letter of the alphabet used to write down the English language has a story to tell. Often we accept them without a second thought and even believe there are only twenty-six of them, whereas if we look more closely there are at least fifty-two as each of the capital letters has a lower case form. Sometimes they are just smaller versions of the larger, such as C and c, or X and x, but the majority of letters have a different form entirely like A and a, or D and d. They also have more than one sound associated with them, many have three, and the mighty letter R involves itself with around seventeen different sounds. No wonder the language takes some mastering! The Book of Letters looks at global English, which the Oxford Online Dictionary refers to as 'British and World English', and examines each letter in minute detail starting with the shape, to the inferred sounds. Fact-finders, teachers and students should all improve their knowledge from this detailed work.

Despite the flourishing of epichoric studies on the Archaic Greek scripts in the 1960s, embodied by archaeologists Lilian Hamilton Jeffery and Margherita Guarducci, most scholarship on early alphabetic writing in Greece has focused on questions around the origin of ‘the Greek alphabet’ instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic times. The present book proposes to bring back the epichoric approach by focusing on the different ways in which the earliest epigraphic evidence represents the spoken Greek dialects. However, instead of continuing the palaeographic methodology of previous studies, this analysis follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics, more specifically the methodology of comparative graphematics. By examining the grapheme-phoneme relationships across Greek-speaking regions, it is possible to recognize that diversity and to draw connections with neighboring contemporaneous alphabets, such as those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and Etruscan. This work, carried out within the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project, aims to contribute towards the conceptualization of the so-called epichoric scripts as independent alphabets, as well as their framing within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean writing systems. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.