Alphabet Illustré 1,868

Devinez l'alphabet, Guess the Alphabet, was written by P.-J. Stahl, the pen name Pierre-Jules Hetzel used for his own books even as he ran the Paris publishing house printing them. The illustrations came from Théophile Schuler, an Alsatian painter known for scenes of rural life, and the two of them built the book around a real constraint: French has very few native words for several letters of its own alphabet.

K, W, X and Y all needed help from somewhere outside the language. Kirschwasser is German, borrowed whole for cherry brandy. Wapiti came into French by way of English, from a word for elk. Xantippe reaches back to the Greek wife of Socrates. Yatagan is a Turkish sabre. Even S leans on a loanword, Selam, a Turkish custom of sending coded messages through an arrangement of flowers.

The W plate does not show an elk at all. It shows a boy peering over two playing cards pinched upright into the shape of the letter, balanced on a pair of books with real Stahl and Hetzel titles printed on their spines, a small joke for anyone who noticed that French playing cards have no W in their suit names either.