Three years ago, while on summer vacation, I was browsing the children’s book offerings in a used bookstore in Portland, ME. I had my toddler in tow, who at twenty months had approximately twenty words in his vocabulary. Needless to say, I was very excited about my son’s budding communication skills. So when I stumbled across The Alphazeds, a wacky picture book about the alphabet illustrated by graphic designer Milton Glaser and written by his wife, Shirley Glaser, I immediately bought it. Each letter is drawn in a different font and is anthropomorphized with alliterated personality—Angry A, Bashful B, Confused C, et cetera. The letters exist in a Hobbesian state of crankiness and war until the lights go out and the letters get scared and end up forming the very first “word” in an effort to comfort one another.

The book was a hit with my son; in the years since I’ve probably read this book aloud a hundred times. But just recently, as I was flipping through the endnotes, I noticed something that gave me pause. Glaser wrote that all the Alphazeds in the book are “based on real characters that belong to typographic families, with curious names.” I skimmed through: A is written in “Aurora,” B in “Bodoni,” C in “Corinthian”...