A form of verbal gymnastics, lipograms are written works that deliberately omit a certain letter of the alphabet by avoiding all words that include that letter. `Lipo' actually means `lacking' - in this case lacking a letter. An example of a contemporary lipogram is the nursery rhyme, `Mary Had a Little Lamb', rewritten without the letter s:
Mary had a little lamb
With fleece a pale white hue,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb kept her in view;
To academe he went with her,
Illegal, and quite rare;
It made the children laugh and play
To view a lamb in there.
- A. Ross Eckler
1. JACQUES ARAGO - AN A-LESS BOOK
The French author's book Voyage Autour du Monde Sans la Lettre A debuted in Paris in 1853. However, 30 years later in another edition, he admitted letting one letter a sneak by him in the book - he had overlooked the word serait.
2. GYLES BRANDRETH - HAMLET WITHOUT ANY I's
A contemporary British lipogrammarian, Brandreth specialises in dropping a different letter from each of Shakespeare's plays. All I's were excluded from Hamlet, rendering the famous soliloquy: `To be or not to be; that's the query'. He proceeded to rewrite Twelfth Night without the letters l and o, Othello without any o's, and Macbeth without any a's or e's.
3. GOTTLOB BURMANN - R-LESS POETRY
Bearing an obsessive dislike for the letter r, Burmann not only wrote 130 poems without using that letter, but he also omitted the letter r from his daily conversation for 17 years. This practice meant the eccentric 18th-century German poet never said his own last name.
4. A. ROSS ECKLER - LIPOGRAM NURSERY RHYMES
Eckler's speciality is rewriting well-known nursery rhymes such as `Little Jack Horner', excluding certain letters. His masterpiece was `Mary Had a Little Lamb', which he re-created in several versions, omitting in turn the letters s, a, h, e, and t (as in the t-less `Mary had a pygmy Lamb').
5. PETER DE RIGA - A LIPOGRAM BIBLE
Summarising the entire Bible in Latin, the sixteenth-century canon of Rheims Cathedral in France omitted a different letter of the alphabet from each of the 23 chapters he produced.
6. TRYPHIODORUS - A LIPOGRAM ODYSSEY
The Greek poet Tryphiodorus wrote his epic poem Odyssey, chronicling the adventures of Ulysses, excluding a different letter of the alphabet from each of the 24 books. Thus, the first book was written without alpha, the second book contained no betas, etc.
7. LOPE DE VEGA CARPIO - 5 NOVELS WITHOUT VOWELS
Also known as Spain's first great dramatist who reputedly wrote 2,200 plays, this sixteenth-century author wrote five novels that were lipograms. Each book omitted one of the five vowels a, e, i, o and u in turn.
8. ERNEST VINCENT WRIGHT - NOVEL WITHOUT AN E
Tying down the e key on his typewriter to make sure one didn't slip in, Wright, a graduate of MIT, wrote a credible 50,110-word novel, Gadsby (1939), totally excluding the most frequently used letter of the English alphabet. `Try to write a single-word sentence without an e,' said the Los Angeles Times, `and you will get some idea of the task he set himself'. Wright's novel concerned the effort of a middle-age man named John Gadsby to make his home town of Branston Hills more progressive and prosperous by turning over its administration to an Organization of Youth. Wright, a 67-year-old Californian, undertook his e-less novel to prove such a feat could be done. He wrote the book in 165 days. He employed no tricks, such as coining words or substituting apostrophes for e's. His greatest difficulty, he stated, was in avoiding the use of verbs ending with ed, being forced to use `said' for `replied' or `asked', and in avoiding all pronouns such as `he', `she' or `they'. Wright died on the day of his book's publication - but the $3.00 novel remains his monument. Today it sells at rare-book dealers for more than $1,000 a copy with a jacket.
9. GEORGES PEREC - E-LESS AND E-FULL NOVELS
Perec (1936-82) was a member of the literary group Oulipo (a French acronym for `workshop of potential literature), the members of which experimented with constrained writing. Perec's most notable work in this regard is his novel La Disparation (1969), written without the letter e. It was translated into English, also without e's, by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void. Another Perec novel, Les Revenentes (1972), is a sort of opposite: the letter e is the only vowel used.
10. CHRISTIAN BOK - VOWEL-LESS POETRY
Bok, an experimental Canadian poet, wrote Eunoia, a work in which each chapter is missing four of the five vowels. The fourth chapter, for example, does not contain a, e, i, or u. A sample of the writing from this chapter is: `Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth.' Eunoia won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 and became one of the best-selling works of Canadian poetry.
11. MARK DUNN - AN INCREASINGLY LIPOGRAMMATIC BOOK
Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea (2001) is subtitled `A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable'. The story concerns a small country that begins to outlaw the use of various letters. As each letter is banned within the story, it is no longer used in the text of the novel
