Well, as you might expect, it turns out that the “perfect alphabet” of the title, which the book sets forth as remedy to the “absurdities” of English, also mentioned in the title, is a phonetic alphabet created by Comstock himself.

Quote: “It is generally admitted that our orthography is more complicated than that of any other language. Various attempts have been made by different individuals to simplify it. The author of this treatise, however, proposes not only to simplify it, but to perfect it.”

Before you go off half-cocked mocking and scoffing Dr. Comstock for pomposity, first remind yourself that he invented his more-perfect-than-English alphabet at a time when religious and philosophical outlooks on causality were giving way to scientific ones, which is to say that the prevailing feeling among the educated was that with some properly focussed brain-power any “problem” could be “solved” by scientific means, that this was the age of the elocution movement, and that there had already been, before he ever set overconfident pen to paper, at least a century’s worth of individual efforts to overhaul English. Benjamin Franklin had made his own attempt as early as the 1760’s after all, and you wouldn’t mock old Ben now would you?

Then there is the little matter which, being so far removed from grammar school, you have likely forgotten- English is a weird and knotty frankensteinian creature.

(After many paragraphs to back up the statement) Comstock puts it this way: “Our language is hedged about with difficulties which can hardly be overcome even by years of laborious study. The young student is obliged to waste much precious time in learning to spell and read our crooked words, and the adult foreigner is appalled by obstacles which seem to be insurmountable. Now, all these difficulties would be entirely removed by the adoption of a perfect alphabet — an alphabet which should represent language phonetically.”

Of course, now that you’ve reminded yourself of these things, you can go ahead and laugh anyway.

I personally find myself amused, not so much by the seemingly quixotic quest to just put on the brakes and change the course of a living language, but by the obvious galled irritation Dr. Comstock felt.

Quote: “...the 38 elementary sounds of the English language are represented in 336 different ways, which may be considered equivalent to three hundred and thirty-six different letters! Is it possible to conceive of a more complicated, absurd, unphilosophical, and barbarous system of orthography?”

Barbarous?! Hahaha.

We, all of us, find aspects of our own vocations thorny and annoying. The convolutions and abstruseness and wrong-mindedness which seem to permeate every human endeavor formulated or informed by any consciousness other than our own can exasperate; but imagine if your vocation was language! Imagine if it were English itself that stuck in your craw. Talk about fighting windmills. 

Anyhow, if you are interested, Comstock’s phonetic alphabet broke down essentially as follows- 

Quote: “This Alphabet comprises all the letters of the Phonetio Alphabet for the English Language, with additional ones to represent sounds peculiar to foreign languages. Comstock’s Phonetic Alphabet is the common, or Boman alphabet, not only so extended, by the addition of new letters, that there is a character for every articulate sound, but so improved by the introduction of signs for the various modifications of the voice in speech, that there is a character for every accent, inflection, intonation, etc. Hence it must be considered a perfect alphabet.”

Including all 44 characters and 16 tone marks Comstock’s perfect alphabet looked like this-

If you were enthusiastic about the alphabet and wanted to set about immediately hand-writing a letter to your dear old mother, or your betrothed in Niagara Falls, you could refer to this chart as a guide-

Meanwhile if you wanted to set about teaching the gents down at the club or the fellows at the beer garden this new method, some charts depicting mouth articulations, grouped by phoneme, would be helpful. Luckily Comstock furnished these, saying- 

Quote: “An accurate knowledge of the positions which the organs of articulation should assume in the formation of the several elements of vocal language, is very important to those who would speak with ease and elegance. To aid the reader still further in the acquisition of this knowledge, he is furnished with the various postures of the mouth, required in uttering the elements energetically, and singly.”

“The pupil should exercise his organs of speech, in the most forcible manner, every day, on all the elements. The vowels should be exploded from the throat, both interrogatively and affirmatively, in every range of pitch.”

Certainly, even armed with logic and charts and enthusiasm, there would be some doubters. To them, leaving aside stability and ease of use, you could quote a few of the many benefits Comstock himself lists, like, say-

3. It would enable one to spell and read in one-twentieth the time required by the present absurd and barbarous orthography.

4. It would render the teaching and the learning of the English language, which, by the old theory, are extremely irksome, highly interesting.

7. It would interdict provincialisms; because, according to this theory, all words are spelled as they are pronounced, and, consequently, pronounced as they are spelled, every graphic word being a perfect Daguerreotype of the vocal word which it represents.

10. As, in phonetic spelling, most of the words have fewer letters than are employed in our present orthography, this alphabet would enable a writer to put more matter upon the same page.

13. The adoption of this alphabet would not only be the means of greatly advancing the cause of science and literature, but would be invaluable to the missionary in disseminating a knowledge of the gospel among the heathen.

How can you argue with that? Comstock certainly couldn’t see any way.

Quote: “The Author feels confident that no one who peruses this treatise understandingly, will desire to cling any longer to the old system of orthography, unless he prefers chaos to order, —discord to harmony, —darkness to light. Hence, he sends forth his Alphabet to the world with the most sanguine expectation that it will meet the entire approbation of the public, and be speedily adopted.”

I might wonder weather, having seen his countrymen choose chaos, discord, and darkness over his perfect alternative, he died sanguine as well… were it not for the obvious linguistic contradiction of it.

Anyhow, hindsight being smug and sadistic as it is, we know his grandiloquent claims and aims came to naught. We know also that the scores of other contrived alphabets which came before and after his met similar fates. I don’t believe there has ever been a constructed script, in the history of the world, which has supplanted a “naturally” evolved predecessor by dint of logic and force of will. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that, as in Comstock’s case, a switch might benefit 3rd graders and immigrants but would effectively render the entire adult population of the country illiterate in the bargain?

Perhaps it’s because, ever since learning as ankle-biters what the characters MOMMY added up to, our alphabet is so intertwined with our language, and hence, our thoughts, our minds, our being, that we would never and could never willingly replace it?

Perhaps it’s because language is a vibrant and living and evolving thing which has never, not even in or present “barbarous” orthography, been truly tamed and finally codified?

Or perhaps it’s just that the overwhelming majority of us are not elocution teachers, or linguists, or grammarians, and so the quirks of English just simply do not stick in our craws enough to warrant, in any of our minds, a “solution?”

Hell, I don’t know.

Though his perfect alphabet is all but forgotten, I would like to thank Dr. Comstock, none the less, for not only affording me a chuckle (which I suppose I ought to be offering apologies for rather than thanks) but more importantly for occasioning circumstances in which the letters “Phonemenon” could be put together, in that exact order, and be something other than a misspelling.

So in his honor, finally, let me offer the following, may it live on in the minds and mouths of we who have choosen chaos, discord, and darkness:

Pho·nem·e·non [fo-neem-uh-non]
noun. plural: phonemena.
1. A vocalization, or sound made with the mouth, that is perceptible by the senses.
2. A remarkable or outstanding utterance.

Hope you enjoyed.

Further reading and viewing:

Books
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Form of the Books of the Ancients, c.1837
Bibliopegia: Or, The Art of Bookbinding in All Its Branches, c.1848
Bookbinding Considered as a Fine Art, Mechanical Art, and Manufacture, c.1882
Bookbinding Old and new: Notes of a Book-lover, c.1895
Bookbinding for Amateurs, c.1885
The Art of Bookbinding: A Practical Treatise, c.1890
Modern Bookbinding, Their Design and Decoration, c.1906
Historical Essay on the Art of Bookbinding, c.1883
The Art of Book-binding, Its Rise and Progress, c.1850
A Collection of Facsimiles of Historical & Artistic Book-bindings, c.1889
Examples of the Art of Book-binding, c.1897
The Book, Its History and Development, c.1908
A Short History of Bookbinding, c.1895
Bookbinding in England and France, c.1897

Sites
Publisher’s Bindings Online, 1815-1930
Cyclopaedia: Virtual Bookbinding
Hand Bookbinding: Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious
American Bookbinders Museum: Tickets & Equipment
Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: Colour Plates & Dictionary.
Deutsches Buchbindermuseum
Netherlands National Museum Special Collection
History of Irish Bookbinding
Scottish Decorative Bookbinding
History of Chinese Bookbinding
Bibliopegia: A History of Bookbinding

Enjoy.

This first sequence was a “corporate presentation for television” (read: mini-commercial) created by Bass for the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation. It appeared at the beginning of the series Small World, which the company sponsored. Its goal was “to indicate the firm’s range of activities through symbols.” Saul handled the animation and it was put out by Playhouse Pictures.

You can see the entire sequence in one large image by clicking here.

The second sequence was also created for Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation. This time the “corporate presentation” focused on the companies range of packaging materials and their “functional suitability.” Again Saul handled the animation and it was put out by Playhouse Pictures.

You can see this entire sequence in one large image by clicking here.

It’s hard to really get a sense of these mini-commercials from a handful of stills, to tell whether they were “successful” as corporate presentations, whether they were fun, or catchy, or memorable. I suspect that they were.

It’s interesting to see, even on this limited level, how Saul approached that task which has been seemingly omnipresent since the beginning of direct advertising- making giant corporations which manufacture things like blasting powder, gunpowder, ammunition cartridges, and and endless array of deadly chemicals seem cuddly and approachable, or at very least human. This is a task advertising agencies still wrestle with today, with often cloying and nauseating results. (Think petroleum, defense, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals.)

I believe beyond his unquestionable talents Saul actually had a built-in advantage over those that wrestle with the task today. The 50’s and 60’s were an era in which the friendly, “cartoony,” hand-drawn illustration was king. King I say! It was a visual language and style that could make damn near anything seem wholesome. ⊕

Lastly, as a tiny bonus let me offer a few scant shots from the title sequence for the film The Shrike which Mr. Bass did and which seem to be absent from the internet as well. Here you go.

Anyhow, hope you completeists and design-folk found some pleasure in that. To the rest of you- better luck next time.

Note: all of sequence images above were scanned from the book, Design In Motion by John Halas and Roger Manvell, published 1962.

First, a few words on origins–

Drink as “offering” has been a documented aspect of prayer ceremony from the dawn of history in both Pagan and Judeo-Christian traditions.

Quote: “An early Greek custom called for a pledge of three cups-one to Mercury, one to the Graces, and one to Zeus. In Rome, drinking to another’s health became so important, the Senate decreed that all diners must drink to Augustus at every meal. Fabius Maximus declared that no man should eat or drink before he had prayed for him and drank to his health.” -Paul Dickson. ⊕

The transition from “toasting” the Gods to toasting the Emperor (who was himself at various times considered a god) was a convenient bridge that eventually lead to the toasting of any socially important person, and finally to the toasting of any privately important person, living or dead. 

The physical action we are familiar with of standing amongst friends and lifting a glass, devoid of religious significance, evidently also dates back to ancient Greece. It seems that the poisoning of drinks was a wide-spread enough practice that a host would make a great show of standing, pouring out wine from a common pitcher, and drinking the first glass himself, as means of saying, “look at what a swell host I am, I am not poisoning any of you!” or to put it slightly more poetically- “to friendship!” At which point he’d raise his glass high as an invitation for his guests to do likewise.

The term “toast” itself is thought to have come from the Romans, who evidently found themselves drinking a lot of sub-par wine. They’d drop a piece of burnt bread into wine, the charcoal of which would reduce the drinks acidity, making it more palatable. This toast may have also been included with the wine as a token bit of nourishment. ⊕ The term stuck even after the practice of including the burnt bread died out. It mutated even further when, in the golden age of toasting, the act of drinking a toast to women admired but not present spawned the phrase “toast of the town.”

Meanwhile there is a connected custom, the clinking of glasses, to consider. There are three theories as to its origin. The first is attributed again to the Greeks’ proclivity for poison. It’s thought that the hearty thud of wine vessels against one another might facilitate an exchange of liquid from one vessel to another, thus ensuring any poison would be imbibed by all. A second theory attributes the clinking of glasses to the Christian era. It was thought that the bell-like clink of glasses would banish the Devil, who was thought to literally inhabit liquor (and be the cause of the ill behavior of the drunken), and who was repelled by the sound of bells. The third theory, which sounds entirely more modern to me, is that all five senses had to come into play to get the greatest pleasure from drink, the sight, the smell, the touch, the taste, and with the clink… the sound.

In truth the species of speach which we moderns refer to as “a toast,” meaning the one word salutations, often in a phonetically-sounded foreign tongue, the literal meaning of which we rarely know, is only the dimmest shadow of a once grand and formal tradition of dinner speaking. Today, for the average person not serving as an ambassador on distant soil, that tradition is relegated almost exclusively to the dreaded wedding toast, in which a bitter and terrified “best man” stumbles his way through those few words which represent the final hurdle in his race to the open bar.

In the heyday of toasting the whole affair was elaborate enough that scores of books were published to help people navigate the treacherous rules of etiquette involved for both toast-giver and audience, and no drink could be drunk without “a few words” of praise to someone. To drink without offering a toast was simply an affront to everyone in the room, and this imperative evidently protracted even casual occasions into 8 or 10 hour binges.

Today it would just be impossible. Imagine heading over to your local Tex-Mex place for a few 6 dollar Coronas after a crappy day in your shabby cubicle, only to realize you were a “best man,” in a room full of nothing but other “best men,” obliged to speak and listen before every… single… round; for 10 hours. Didn’t Sartre write a play about that?

In any case, as I said at the beginning, the “hour of the toast” is fast approaching, and though I don’t expect many of you will want to wax eloquent, at length, in iambic pentameter, about how much you love your mother, or country, or best mates, you may still wish to surprise everyone with something a bit more imaginative than the expected, “May you rock out with yer cock out and jam out with yer clam out! Down the hatch!”

With that in mind I am including below a small sampling of toasts (mostly culled from the 1927 volume, The Big Toast-Book, by Carleton B. Case, pictured above) so antiquated sounding that they might be just the thing to… oh, I don’t know… persuade your mightily disappointed and old-fashioned father that he ought not disown you just yet, or convince your significant other’s parents that you’re more than the coarse, dead-eyed, lout you appear to be, or induce premature nostril-vomiting in your rivals, or embarrass the hell out of your sweetheart. Who knows? Maybe they’ll just inspire you to come up with a decent toast yourself and revive in some small way the time honored tradition.

For the Romantics:

Here’s to the one and only one,
And may that one be she
Who loves but one and only one,
And may that one be me.
-
Here’s to love, The only fire against which there is no insurance.
-
God made women both beautiful and foolish–
Beautiful, that man might love her;
Foolish, that she might love him.
-
Here’s to everything old! Old friends, old times, old books, and old wine.
-
Flow wine, smile woman, and the universe is consoled. -Beranger

For the Bachelors:

Love is the wine of life
And marriage is the morning after.
-
I would advise a young man to pause
Before he takes a wife;
In fact I see no earthly cause
Why he should not pause for life.
-
Here’s to the woman! –ah that we could fall into her arms
Without falling into her hands! -Bierce
-
A pipe, a book, a fire, a friend,
A stein that’s always full,
Here’s to the joys of a bachelor’s life,
A life that’s never dull.

For the Married:

To Home! The place where you are treated best and grumble most.
-
He is not worthy of the honeycomb
That shuns the hive because the bees have stings. -Shakespeare
-
Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love. -Ovid
-
Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore, and you sleep alone.

For the Naughty:

Here’s head first, to a foaming glass!
Here’s head first, to a lively lass!
Here’s head first, for a bit of kissing,
For the good don’t know the fun they are missing!
-
Here’s to the ships of our navy,
Here’s to the ladies of our land,
May the former be well rigged,
And the latter be well manned.
-
Here’s to the lasses we’ve loved, my lad,
Here’s to the lips we’ve pressed.
For of kisses and lasses,
Like liquor in glasses,
The last is always the best.

For the Bitter:

Here’s to the woman with face so fair,
Framed in a wreath of beautiful hair;
Pretty red lips as soft as a rose–
How many have kissed them God only Knows.
-
Here’s to the love that lies in a woman’s eyes,
And lies, and lies, and lies.

For the Old Sots:

Which is the properest day to drink–
Saturday, Sunday, Monday?
Each is the properest day I think,
Why should I name but one day?
-
Here’s to the heart that fills as the bottle empties.
-
Man being reasonable must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication;
Glory, the grape, love, gold– in these are sunk
The hopes of all men and of every nation. -Byron
-
God made man frail as a bubble;
God made love, love made trouble;
God made the vine– was it a sin
That man made wine to drown trouble in?
-
Grasp the bowl; in nectar sinking
Man of sorrow, drown thy thinking!

For the Ladies:

If kissing were the only joy of bed,
One woman would another woman wed.
(followed by winking and giggling)
-
The more one sees of men the more one likes dogs.

For the Men:

You shall and you shan’t,
You will and you wont,
You’re condemned if you do,
And you’re damned if you don’t

For Parents:

Go back to bed!
I know it’s loud it’s grown-up time.
No you can’t have any of my grape juice,
Just go back to bed please.
Honey, you have to go back to bed
Because the monster is on his way
And he likes to eat children.
Yes he eats them
And chews up their bones.
He ate one of the neighbor kids last night.
Yes, he’s on his way here right now…
Wait, I think I hear him on the steps!
You better get to bed quick. RUN!

For All:

Yesterday’s yesterday while today’s here,
Today is today till tomorrow appear,
Tomorrow’s tomorrow until today’s past,
And kisses are kisses as long as they last.
-
May you live all the days of your life. -Swift
-
Weep and you are called a baby,
Laugh and you are called a fool,
Yield and you’re called a coward,
Stand and your called a mule,
Smile and they’ll call you silly,
Frown and they’ll call you gruff,
Put on a front like a millionaire,
And somebody calls your bluff.
-
May bad luck follow you all the days of your life,
And never overtake you.
-
At ten, a child; at twenty, wild;
At thirty tame, if ever;
At forty wise; at fifty, rich;
At sixty, good or never!
-
While we live, let’s live in clover,
For when we’re dead, we’re dead all over.

And finally, here’s one especially for me to make:

May the people who dance on your grave get cramps in their legs!


Lastly I would just like to mention how strikingly perfect the symbolism of holding up a full glass, especially on New Years Eve, seems to me. We hold it there, brimming, shining and untouched. So much optimism for everything which is to come, for the fun yet to be had, for the possibilities which await! We take that first delicious and refreshing sip with bright eyes. But of course, by the end of the night it’s a different story though isn’t it? The glass lays toppled, used-up, cracked, empty and we… we are nauseous, disheveled, most likely embarrassed and full of some vague regret, having yet again failed to learn anything from the previous time we held up a glass, confidently swearing that things would be different.


For more on the history and art of toasting see the following:
The History & Ritual of the Toast
Toastbook by Paul Dickson
Drinkingsongs.net which offers many toasts as well as a terrific bibliography
Wine, Women, and Song published 1884
In Praise of Ale published 1888
Toasts published 1895
The Banquet Book Published 1902
400 Laughs, or Fun without Vulgarity published 1902
Rare Bits of Humor published 1906
Irish Toasts published 1908
A Tankard of Ale, an Anthology of Drinking Songs published 1920
More Toasts published 1922

Hope you enjoyed.
Happy New Year all and sundry! 2008 will be different! I swear!

Quote: “The earliest printed works of the movement focused on alcohol’s bad influence on health, including the immediate effects of drunkenness (like vomiting and headache) and the perceived long-term effects of chronic drinking (like delirium tremens, spontaneous human combustion, madness, and death). When the movement blossomed in the early 1830s, medical arguments made up a powerful element in encouraging temperance.” -Ardent Spirits

Meanwhile, since the headaches and vomiting and madness and spontaneous combustion didn’t seem potent enough deterents on their own, other works focussed instead on the moral and religious ramifications of strong drink. “You’ll destroy your family, you’ll lose your home, you’ll burn in the bad place!” It was a potent logos/pathos one-two punch of rhetoric which, just prior to the Civil War, managed to win over no less than 1,500,000 proponents.

Below I present a small cross section of the rich and varied cornucopia of printed ephemera which has been passed down to us from our temperate forbearers. Have a look.

What follows is an excerpt of the text A Study In Faces which accompanied the image above:

“What a bright earnest face this boy had! Just such a face as everybody likes to see. Many years ago a great artist wanted to make an attractive picture for his studio and he chose such a face. He called it “Innocence,” and you might label this boy with the same word.

Now look at the other face. What is attractive about it? Not a feature to admire, but everything to make one turn away in disgust. One would almost be afraid to be in the company of a man with such a face, for the character is shown in the face and if the boy is a picture of innocence, the man is a picture of all that is vile and hateful.

Now compare the two faces before you. The features are similar yet so different. Both represent the same face, but what a change!

The artist has given you a glimpse of the way in which thousands of bright, clean boys have been first fascinated and then defiled and ruined. No one who learns to like wine, beer, cider, any alcoholic drink can be sure of escaping such a fate, for nothing tends more strongly to defile human beings and make them unclean forever than alcohol.”

With the outbreak of the Civil War interest in temperance (understandably) cooled. People presumably had more immediate and important concerns. That fact alone says something about the temperance movement on the whole I’d have to say. It would be a generation before the general levels of comfort and boredom made allowances for a moral outrage potent enough to usher in a legislated country-wide prohibition. We all know how that went over.

And today? What of the Temperance movement? Well, today, all these morally blighted years later, a vestige of those glory days of temperance does in fact remain, visible for all to see.

Behold!







Well, just barely visible for all to see, but it’s there! Congratulations righteous forbearers.

Hope you enjoyed.

For more on the temperance movement in America see the following-

Ardent Spirits
Alcohol, Temperance, & Prohibition at Brown University.
Alcohol and Crime
The Temperance Archive
Alcoholism and the Temperance Movement in Early American Folk Art
Temperance & Prohibition at Ohio State
The Anti-Saloon League
Temperance Movements in the Catholic Encyclopedia
A History of Alcohol Prohibition at the Drug Library
Drinking in America: a History.

Note: nearly all of the images above were found through The Library of Congress “American Memory” site.