From Letter to Letter
written and illustrated by Teri Sloat
Dutton, 1989

• New York Times Best Picture Book

Reviews

New York Times: Witty and challenging, but not beyond children…

School Library Journal: An attractive alphabet book that succeeds admirably at presenting both capital and lower-case letters on each page in a way that will intrigue young viewers.

Kirkus Starred: …this is a delight. The illustrations…are full of charming detail; the links between upper and lower-case letters on each page are especially creative and amusing.

Booklist: A rich but quiet lesson for independent browsers or children sharing this with adults.

About the Book

When my son, Matt, was 2, we bought him a set of sheets that had the alphabet in large letters as a design. Inside each of the letters were objects that started with that letter. At night we would look at the sheets and name as many things as we could that were in the pictures.

The sheets gave me an idea and when our friends started having children, I made posters of their baby's names in big letters and put rows of things that started with that letter inside. By the time Matt, Amy, Carrie, Jennifer, Julianna, Jessica, Sam, and Steven were put into posters, I had most of the letters of the alphabet. You know how that goes—that gave me an idea for a book!

In each illustration, something extends from the upper case letter to make the scene around the lower case letter. I had fun making the scenes and you can do what I did. I went through the dictionary and made lists of things that went together and chose which list I thought made the best scene.

For the B page, I chose bear, blackberry and bees, because I like to draw bears so much, but I could have made a bakery from the list that had bread, baker, bakery, buns, and bowl and connected the letters with a train of bread pans on a conveyor belt. For the C page, I could have had cars driving to the city with cabs.