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Among Shaw’s quixotic adventures was his effort to reform the English alphabet. Shaw considered the Latin alphabet to be an inadequate tool for the English language, and tried unsuccessfully, to convince academics, government employees, and several other agencies of his case for reform. He stipulated in his will that a competition be held to create a new writing system, and that his play, Androcles and the Lion, (pictured here), would be printed in the winning alphabet. The new alphabet, Shaw specified, should consist of 40 letters instead of 26 and contain an unambiguous symbol for each phonetic sound, so that no one sound would need to be written with groups of letters. The competition was held in 1958, eight years after Shaw’s death, and Kingsley Read, an architect and designer with a keen interest in phonetics, was the winner. In 1962, Penguin Books published 47,000 copies of a bi-alphabetic version of Androcles and the Lion, 13,000 in hardback. It is, to date, the only book ever printed in the Shavian alphabet.