AlphaBet in Color: Text of Vladimir Nabokov illustrated by Jean Holabird, with a Foreword by Brian Boyd - 2005

Corte Madera, CA:: Gingko Press,, 2005.. 226.25 x 170 mm; 38 pages with 74 color illustrations. Printed on 200 gsm Tintoretto paper. Double flap binding in Sirio cloth. With appendix and notes. Jean Holabird, introduction: "Vladimir Nabokov had the condition known as synesthesia ... It is a 'mixing of the senses' which manifested itself for the writer as .. colored hearing, the involuntary attribution of colors to the sounds of letters. The alphabet ... is my attempt at interpreting Vladimir Nabokov's delightful account of his own vivid version of the condition." Barbara Wyllie, review: "For all those readers who have often wondered what the 'dull green, combined somehow with violet' of Nabokov's W would look like, or tried to imagine the distinction between the 'light blue' of his C and the blend of 'azure and mother-of-pearl' of his S, Jean Holabird has done a great service. Her interpretation of Nabokov's alphabet offers for the first time a pictorial realization (in watercolour)of the very exact tonal quality of the letters, as well as a depiction of their visual character. The letters are not given in their alphabetic sequence but are ordered, rather, in Nabokov's groupings, from black which includes A, G and R, the 'sooty rag being ripped' (pp. i i and 36) through the colours which form Nabokov's own very unique rainbow spectrum white, blue, green, yellow, brown and red. These appear together in a final concluding image to make up what he described as his 'primary, but decidedly muddy rainbow' and the 'hardly pronounceable: kzspygv' (pp. 35 and 36).  "In his foreword, Brian Boyd dexterously explores the implications of Nabokov's 'audition coloree', emphasizing the fusion of science and art that it encapsulates, and its manifestation in the multiple and various rainbows that feature throughout Nabokov's work. These range from the images that recur throughout 'Speak, Memory' to the fanciful rainbow-hued butterflies that he sketched in the margins of his manuscripts, to the themes that connect this distinctive spectrum of colours so intriguingly with the most vital elements of his art: language, imagination and memory.