Kingsley Read alphabet collection

MS 1103

1903-1978

Ronald Kingsley Read was born on the outskirts of Birmingham on 19 February 1887. He studied design at the Birmingham School of Art. His varied career included becoming a partner in a toy factory and running his own sign lettering business, but throughout his life he was an avid scholar of phonetics, and had studied the alphabets of Robert Bridges and Henry Sweet throughout the 1930s. By the early 1940s he had ceased his work and had begun to experiment with alphabet making, partly in thanks to the commercial disruption caused by the war-time bombing of Birmingham. It was during this time in which Read created his first manual for a new alphabet titled ‘The Symbols’. Read had previously been in correspondence with George Bernard Shaw regarding alphabet reform and had been struck by Shaw’s ground-breaking declaration in ‘The Miraculous Birth of Language’. Shaw maintained his commitment to language reform throughout his life, and after his death his will made provision for Pitman to establish a Shavian Alphabet with help from a grant from The Public Trustee. After some legal dispute, a world-wide competition was announced to design his alphabet, with the aim of producing a system that would be a more economical way of writing and printing the English language. Read was one of four contestants chosen to share the prize money for the alphabet, and eventually became its sole designer. By 1960, after 18 years of refinement, he had produced a 48-character writing system written from left to right with the same numerals and roughly the same punctuation as standard English. Supporting material included typewriters which could be ordered from the Imperial Typewriter Company, as well as the journal ‘Shaw-script’, which was printed using the Shavian alphabet. After the extensive testing of Shavian with English speakers around the world, Read modified the Shavian alphabet, turning it into a version known as ‘Quickscript’, which had more ligatures and appeared more cursive than Shavian in an attempt to make it easier to write by hand. Just before his death in 1975, Read abandoned the Shavian alphabet completely, and instead chose to finish his work on an enlarged version of the Roman alphabet called ‘Soundspell’, also known as ‘Readspel’. This was an alphabet constructed of 42 letters, ‘spelling 42 phonemes with perfect constancy and economy of lettering’ and designed to ‘produce an exact spelling of known pronunciations as the most encouraging initial medium in learning to read’.

The collection comprises the personal papers of Kingsley Read and documents his work on spelling reform and alternative writing systems in the twentieth century. It includes research notes and press cuttings on alphabets and alphabet reform; correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, I. J. Pitman and other advocates of spelling reform; drafts charting the development of Shaw-script; letters and extracts written in Shaw-script; material relating to Quickscript and Readspel/Sound-spell, including correspondence and examples of use; published literature on alphabets and spelling reform; records concerning the transfer of the archive to the University of Reading and the exhibition held in 1972; and portrait photographs, including images of Read and Shaw.

18 boxes

English

fonds

Ronald Kingsley Read, 1887-1975, George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950, Isaac James Pitman

Spelling reform, Alphabet, Shaw alphabet, Phonetic spelling, Shorthand

The collection was assembled by Kingsley Read (1887-1975). Correspondence within the collection documents discussions between Read, Michael Twyman and staff of the University of Reading concerning the deposit of the archive and the exhibition "Sound-writing 1892-1972: George Bernard Shaw and a Modern Alphabet", held at the University of Reading in 1972. The collection was catalogued by Patricia Smart in 1983. In 2024-2025, Amy Longmuir, a SWWDTP-funded PhD student on placement with University of Reading Special Collections, converted the paper catalogue into a typed format. During the subsequent review by Special Collections, a stock check was undertaken and duplicate, missing and inconsistent reference numbers were rationalised through renumbering.

The collection is arranged into four series: General material (MS 1103 GEN); Material related to Quickscript (MS 1103 Q); Material related to Read-spel/Sound-spell (MS 1103 RS); and Material related to the Shaw Alphabet (MS 1103 SH).

MS1103-OBJ/001