Bembo's Zoo

A Great Diversion

Bet you've never taken your computer to an outing at the zoo. 'Course, if you're the overly serious type and hauled along a laptop to work on while your children watched the monkeys, you're probably a workaholic and in that case it's unlikely you'd appreciate this delightful diversion any more than you'd let yourself enjoy monkeys at a real zoo.

As I was writing this introduction to Bembo's Zoo, one of my favorite websites, I came across a word I hadn't remembered seeing before. It was "abecedary." I assumed it had something to do with the alphabet and wanted to look it up on my speedy computer dictionary. No luck. Tried Google and found 841 websites using the term but no definitions. Turned to the paper source of "The American Heritage College Dictionary" and still couldn't find it.

However, I did find "abecedarian," which is a noun meaning "one who teaches or studies the alphabet, one who is just learning, a beginner." As an adjective, it means "having to do with the alphabet, being arranged alphabetically, and elementary or rudimentary." Certainly these terms apply to this fabulous site.

The Bembo's Zoo website was created by the graphic designer Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich and is an animated version of his high-concept and appealing picture book, Bembo's Zoo, in which animals are made from stylish letters. Using only letter-forms and punctuation marks in a limited palette of "aqua, burnt orange, buttery cream, brown, and black, the book's visual premise is the exceedingly witty manipulation of letters—in Bembo, a graceful serif font—to create each of the alphabetically correlative animals."

Watching the letters become charming animals should delight any audience. After the zoo doors have opened, just click on a letter and enter a delightfully fanciful world.

— Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT, Editor-in-Chief