Alphamaniacs: Builders of 26 Wonders of the Word

Like any compilation or compendium, some aspects that are stronger, or more subjectively interesting, than others, but as I am a word nerd, so I mostly liked the topics covered.

A – Daniel Nussbaum – writes a book using CA license plates (meh, not my thing)
B – Jean-Dominique Bauby – gets locked-in syndrome and writes a book by indicating letters using blinks (super interesting and added The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to my reading list)
C – Thomas Urquhart – Descartes proposes that someone make a universal language, years later Urquhart responds with the tome Logopandecteision
D – Jessie Little Doe Baird – revives the language of the Wampanoag and gives birth to its first native speaker after seven generations
E – Marc Okrand –creates Klingon (did not mention that Okrand also created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire). I appreciated the mention of Philip José Farmer writing Venus on the Half Shell a book that Kurt Vonnegut had ‘invented' being written by his fictitious Kilgore Trout
F – Ignatius Donnelly – through ‘math' derived a code that Shakespeare didn't write certain plays (eh). Some of the math based wordplay is clever (if a=1, etc; all + vote= democracy), but when its applied to Shakespeare it smacks of conspiracy theory, I works to include this as it becomes a nice counterpoint in a later reference
G – Ross Eckler –more wordplay, this time shift pairs, ‘add' becomes ‘bee' but I thought that the ‘remodeling' (reordering) of the alphabet made the whole idea of the shifted pairs rather arbitrary and therefore moot. Also discussed isograms and self-enumerating sentences
H – Frederic Cassidy – lexicographer, wanted to document spoken English of the USA
I – Doris Cross – making art by crossing words out in a dictionary; erasure art and altered books. Also mentions of the Dadaists
J – Robert Shields – very long, perhaps overly detailed diarists, of which Robert Shields outshines by writing over 37 million words (so-so)
K – Sven Jacobson – Swedish professor who studied English, specializing in English's intentional misspellings (meh)
L – Mike Gold – calligraphy and I rather enjoyed the Larry Brady suggestion of coming up with 100 ways to make a single letter as I appreciate the creativity stretch – and Mr. Gold just ran with it, to creating over a thousand ‘a's
M – David Wallace – stylometry, uses statistics of literary style; figured out which Founding Father wrote which Federalist Paper and indicates that Gen. Pickett's wife wrote his letters that were published under his name. Stylometry also helps search engines, spam filters, and voice assistants.
N –Bohumil Hrabal – Longest sentences. Faulkner at 1,300 words, Joyce at 4,391, Jonathan Coe at 13,955, and then Hrabal for publishing a 128 page book that doesn't have a period (meh)
O – Corín Tellado – Most published books. Asimov published more than 400 books, and one of the only authors to have published widely; Georges Simenon 500 mysteries; Barbra Cartland 700 romance books; Ryoki Inoue and R. F. Lucchetti with over 1,500 books each; and then Corín Tellado over 4,000 and had issues with censorship at the time. Also mentions hypergraphia, of which Dostoyevsky and Lewis Carrol may have had.
P –Raymond Queneau –authored a book of poetry where the lines of the sonnets where written on strips so that lines of one one poem could mingle with others and create new poems.
Q – Georges Perec – wrote a book without using the letter ‘e', the most common letter in French (and I believe English) later he wrote another in which e is the only vowel used.
R – Simon Vostre – books used to be highly valuable items, and many had curses or warnings about theft or being damaged
S – Howard Chace – wrote a book called Anguish Languish, fairy tales and such written to sound like the words that are supposed to be there, eg Wants pawn term dare is supposed to be “Once upon a time there...” this makes me cringe, but glad to know that it exists.
T – Robert McCormick – was editor of The Chicago Tribune introduced respellings of words, some caught on (thru, catalog, dialog, etc.) others did not (photogtaf, sofomore, iland)
U – Mary Ellen Solt – made poems shaped like their subjects
V – A. A. Morrison – Strine, the Australian English accent
W – Ernest Toch – the musicality of language and Toch created Geographical Fugue wherein his chorus speak proper names from an atlas (here's a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZfSolxrLWo). The beginning of the section talks about saying a word twenty times and how it loses its meaning and only leaves its sound, this made me think of the psychological term: clanging
X – David Bryce – smallest writing and smallest books
Y – Allen Read – figures out the origin of OK, I had recalled the mention of how this might have somehow come from Andrew Jackson's nick name of Old Hickory, but he says it's Andrew Jackson's mangled spelling of ‘all correct' (oll korrect), eventually Read finds the first usage of OK in an 1839 newspaper as a comic abbreviation of oll korrect, OK.
Z –Ludwik Zamenhof – creator of Esperanto

Most of these are interesting, brilliant, fun, and great, others not so much. I had hoped that he might mention Sequoyah who created the Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible or code talkers (I'm more familiar with Navajo Code Talkers, but many other languages were also used). I feel that he briefly mentions endangered languages with Jessie Little Doe Baird, but wish he had listed some of them, many are Native American languages, but there are others such as Yiddish, Romani, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh (depending on who you ask), some Indian languages such as Malto, and many others.