The book is a collection of the first sentences from elementary schools primers, used to teach how to read worldwide, specifically in twenty-five countries, including Poland, Sweden, Spain, Japan, Ethiopia. This original idea reinforces reading skills through contact with other languages and promotes basic knowledge about other cultures. For example, on the page with the Greek sentence, “Έλλη, να ένα μήλο” [Elli, this is an apple] (p. 22) someone is reclining on a dining couch, dressed in a blue tunic and sandals, with a laurel wreath on the head, holding an apple in one hand and a lyre in the other, looking like a guest at an ancient Greek or Roman symposium.

The illustration for the sentence in modern Greek alludes to the classical tradition. According to the artist herself, antiquity is the reference defining also modern Greece, its culture, and language. Hence, reading the book is not only an opportunity to acquire basic sentences from all over the world, i.e. a part of literary literacy but also may serve as a useful tool of visual literacy, defined by John Hortin as "the ability to understand and use images to think and learn in terms of images, i.e. to think visually"*. Visual literacy, as important as literary acquisition, "[…] is a social process because it comprises a set of practices that take place within, and are determined by, a particular cultural context. […] Visual literacy also supports the evaluation and critique of images by placing images in context, in relation to the words, to other visuals and texts […]"**. Incorporating two rather unusual objects, i.e. a lyre and a laurel wreath, may provoke questions to which an adult may answer referring to classical antiquity, therefore a child reader may acquire visual elements characteristic for that period of time and learn about ancient history. Besides, combining baby blue and white may refer to the modern Greek flag, illustrator presumably wanted to draw a connection between ancient and contemporary worlds, stressing the continuity of time as well as presence and importance of cultural heritage.

*Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles, Children Reading Pictures. Interpreting visual texts, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 40.

** Evelyn Arizpe, Jennifer Farrar, and Julie McAdam, “Picturebooks and Literacy Studies” inThe Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer, ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2018, 374.

Arizpe, Evelyn and Morag Styles, Children Reading Pictures. Interpreting visual texts, New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Arizpe, Evelyn, Jennifer Farrar and Julie McAdam, “Picturebooks and Literacy Studies”, in The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2018, 371–380.

Szefler, Elżbieta, "Nietypowy (międzynarodowy) elementarz" [Atypical (multinational) alphabet book], Problemy Opiekuńczo-Wychowawcze 2 (2017): 53–60.

The illustration presenting ancient elements courtesy of the publisher Dwie Siostry.