If anyone has ever discovered the value of lipograms, except as exercises
in berbal ingenuity, she or he aint telling. A lipogram is a written
work composed of words chosen so as to avoid the us of specific alphabetic
characters, and the first practitioner of lipography is said to have been
the Greek lyric poet Llllasus, born in Achia in about 548 B.C. The next
great poet to write a letterlels poem was Lasuss pupil, who wrote Ode
minus Segma late in the fifth century B.C. The Greek Odyssey of
Trypbiodorus, however, outdoes both Lasus and Pindar. It consists of 26
books, with no a in the first book, no b in the second, no c in the third,
and so on. (Someone said of the work that it would have been better if the
author left out the other letters, too). Spanish playwright Lope Felix de
Vega Carpio (1562-1635) wrote each of his five novels without using one of
the vowels, but Lope de Vega is far better known for the 2,200 plays
tradition says he completed (close to 500 survive). Another famous
lipogram is Rondens Piece sans A (1816). This was perhaps influenced by
German poet Gottlob Burman (1737-1805), who wrote some 130 poems without
employing the letter r and for 17 years omitted r from his daily
conversation, never speaking his own name, which he hated anyway. James
Thurber wrote a story about a country where the letter o was illegal, but
the best-known American book without a certain letter is Ernest Vincent
Wrights Gadsby (1939), which has no es in it. The author, a California
musician pried the e off his typewriter keyboard to restrain himself and
typed a 267-page, 50,000-word epic using no word containing that most
common of vowels.