The Letter X

Featured below is David Hockney’s alphabet, a celebrated 1991 collaborative artist’s book created by David Hockney to raise funds for the AIDS Crisis Trust. The book pairs Hockney’s vibrant lithographic interpretations of each letter of the alphabet with texts by leading twentieth-century writers and poets, curated by Stephen Spender.

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In 1991, on behalf of the Aids Crisis Trust in London, Sir Stephen Spender invited a number of distinguished writers in Britain and America to contribute original texts, prose or poetry, to accompany an alphabet of initial letters specially drawn for the Trust by David Hockney.

The writers who have responded, in order of appearance, are Joyce Carol Oates, Irish Murdoch, Paul Theroux, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Seamus Heaney, Martin Amis, Erica Jong, Ian McEwan, Nigel Nicolson, Margaret Drabble, Craig Raine, William Boyd, V.S.Pritchett, Doris Lessing, William Golding, Arthur Miller, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, John Updike, Susan Sontag, Anthony Burgess, Douglas Adams and Patrick Leigh Fermor. An unpublished letter by T.S.Eliot has been given by Mrs Valerie Eliot and Lord Norwich donated a 19th century alphabet poem.