A is for Athens

They had been taking photos of letters for a while, they said.

Not the kind that arrive in the mail box, but individual letters in the environment, found on marquees, gates and buildings, in gardens, on buses, over doorways.

They first assembled their own names, using photos from places that had special meaning for them. They started taking more letter photos, first on Amelia Island and then around the state. And then they started taking commissions.

But that’s another story involving Letter Landmarks, a business the two women started in 2009. This is something else.

Last year, Susan Sanders and Kay Isley started working on a cool idea. It blended their love of letters with their years of teaching children, with a dash of local history thrown in for good measure. It took about a year for the project to move from an idea discussed in a coffee house to a slim paperback on a coffee table.

The two long-time friends, both native Athenians, have created “A is for Athens: A Multigenerational Book for Big and Little Readers.” It's a self-published alphabet book about Athens, with photos of letters found around town and stories about the places and items whose names start with the letters. Such a “V” is for “Visitors Center.”

“We wanted it to be for children who never went to the places we included in the book,” said Isley. She taught first grade for 39 years, she said, mostly in Clarke County schools, before retiring two years ago.

“We knew we had all the pictures, we just had to put them together,” said Sanders, herself a recently retired teacher.

So they discussed and culled and arranged. And re-arranged. Isley taught herself how to do layout on a computer so they could give camera-ready copy to to be printed.

The result is a lovely, interesting book that works on different levels: there’s a simple sentence in large type at the top of every page for a child to read. And then a longer, smaller-print explanation further down the page. It’s visually appealing and fun to read---and it contains some stories told to Isley by her father, Bob Tillman.

“Daddy loved to tell stories, and lots of them were about Athens,” she says. “Of course, I don't know how many are true.”

The two friends got their finished copies earlier this week and distributed them to various stores, including , , , and the , among others.

To purchase your own copy, contact the authors at letterlandmarks@gmail.com.