Reading
On this page you will find reading materials in the Shavian alphabet and/or about it. Before attempting to read any of the documents marked "Uses Shavian font", you must download one of the fonts listed here.
Androcles and the Lion
This is the only book ever to have been printed in the Shavian alphabet. It is out of print. Androcles and the Lion is now out of copyright and the monoalphabetical version is now available at Project Gutenberg for free download. An Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the entire text of the bialphabetical Androcles is therefore provided here.
If you don't want to download the whole thing, a short section of the play (the Prologue) has also been reproduced here, as well as the three essays accompanying the text, which were written by those who were involved in the alphabet's creation. They are invaluable to anyone who wishes to learn to read and write Shavian effectively. It is hoped that these documents will inspire you to plunder all of the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops in your area, and to harass Penguin for a reprint.
Sir James Pitman's Introduction to Shaw's Alphabet
Peter MacCarthy's Notes on the Spelling
Kingsley Read's Suggestions for Writing
The Prologue to Androcles and the Lion (eight pages, around 80K each)
The cover of the hardback Public Trustee's Edition of Androcles and the Lion
A list of some errors from the Shavian text of Androcles and the Lion
Finding your own copy of Androcles and the Lion
I could not find a copy of the book even after raiding Charing Cross Road, London, the antiquarian-bookshop capital of the entire Western world. I got mine from a bookshop in Ohio, whose details I found on the Internet, at the Advanced Book Exchange, which lists the catalogues of hundreds of second-hand and antiquarian bookshops throughout the world. Postage to the UK was surprisingly cheap. Try searching the ABE's database for Androcles. The last time I looked, there was a paperback copy at a bookshop in Australia.
Prose
An extract from Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm Uses Shavian font
