Study in Scarlet (Shavian alphabet edition)

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it".

So said Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novel that first introduced the legendary detective to the world. Now, for the first time, you can unravel that scarlet thread in the Shavian alphabet.

The Shavian alphabet takes its name from Irish writer Bernard Shaw who inspired and posthumously funded it. Shaw believed there should be a simpler way to write English. His wish was fulfilled in 1962 following a worldwide competition. The result was an alphabet designed especially for English, with a unique letter for each of the 40 or so basic sounds we all use today.

Whether you view this book as a linguistic curiosity, an eccentric experiment, or as inspiration to explore the possibilities of spelling reform, it shows one thing: the logic of English orthography does not have to remain a mystery worthy of the great detective.