Issue 71 of Devil’s Artisan, A Journal of the Printing Arts, celebrates James Reaney’s magazine Alphabet (1960-1971) with “A Brief History of Alphabet Magazine” by D.I. Brown.
The essay is a revised and updated excerpt from D.I. Brown’s MA thesis, ‘A History and Index of Alphabet Magazine’, which he submitted to the Department of English at McMaster University in April 1973.
“… But, like all of Reaney’s work, the idea of Alphabet was never abandoned. It became absorbed into the collective body of his imaginative output, and many of the ideas tried in the magazine became parts of Reaney’s new work.”
(Devil’s Artisan, Issue 71, page 60)
As part of his research, D.I. Brown conducted taped interviews with James Reaney in the fall of 1971. The full version of Brown’s thesis can be viewed online at: digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca