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Rather than follow the Anglocentric pattern of apple, ball and cat, it looks across a wide variety of languages to create a new abecedarium.

The oldest abecedarium in existence is a child's alphabet on a little ink-bottle of black ware found on the site of Cere, one of the oldest of the Greek settlements in Central Italy, certainly older than the end of the sixth century B. C. The Phœnician alphabet has been reconstructed from several hundred inscriptions.

The curious ritual act, technically known as the abecedarium, i.e. the tracing of the alphabet, sometimes in Latin characters, sometimes in Latin and Greek, sometimes, according to Menard, in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, along the limbs of St Andrew’s cross on the floor of the church, can be traced back to the 8th century and may be earlier.

Altogether they create an enveloping abecedarium in Tandem Press’s booth, one of 90 on hand at the Park Avenue Armory.

Of all the works which we have yet considered, Latin was an essential element: whether the object was, as in the glossaries and vocabularies before the fifteenth century, to explain the Latin words themselves, or as in the Promptorium and Catholicon, the Abecedarium and the Alvearie, and other works of the sixteenth century, to render English words into Latin.