Wordsmiths and bibliophiles unite as Mark Dunn’s “Ella Minnow Pea” celebrates its 20th anniversary by releasing an illustrated edition to mark this milestone.
‘A Novel in Letters’
Ella Minnow Pea resides in the fictional island of Nollop, where Nevin Nollop, the fictitious inventor of the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” hails from. Nollopians pride themselves in their broad vocabulary and, in the absence of the telephone and technology, exercise their main form of communication on the island through letter-writing.
When an alphabet letter tile forming the famous pangram falls off from the top of the cenotaph of its esteemed creator, the five-men Council takes this as a sign that Nollop, communicating from beyond the grave, wishes the letter to be removed from usage. The fateful “Z” tile is excised from the islanders’ utterances and printed forms. Though Nollopians are able to skirt around words like “amazing” and “crazy,” they soon realize that there is more to banning one letter, albeit one that is “marginally important,” than they realize. It means that the library will have to be purged of any books containing the condemned letter. Also, as they have to be extra careful of what words come out of their mouths and what words to use when they correspond by mail, cousin Tassie points out, the whole exercise “stands to rob us of the freedom to communicate without any fetter or harness.”…