Perhaps the most comprehensive article about Alphabet 26 was published in Type Talks magazine (September–October, 1958). It was written by editor Martin Spector. Entitled Bradbury Thompson’s Simplified Alphabet, excerpts from it are presented below.

In our March–April 1958 issue, Type Talks was privileged to republish an article entitled ‘How Old-Fashioned Is Our Alphabet?’ by Frank Denman. In that piece, Mr. Denman wrote, ‘Is it not time that the alphabet—the one major tool of civilization that has remained unaltered for a thousand years—be reforged into a more modern instrument?’ The question was rhetorical, but actually designers, typographers, and phonetic scholars have been at work for years on the construction of a more streamlined alphabet. Many of these experiments, however, were too unfamiliar and unwieldy for public acceptance, or in the case of some of the proposed phonetic alphabets, too complicated in their design.

One man who has been attacking the problem of a simplified alphabet is art director and typographer Bradbury Thompson. Mr. Thompson begins with the premise that there are actually two alphabets in English—an uppercase alphabet and a lowercase alphabet. There are only 26 letters in the language, yet there are 45 symbols for these letters. According to Mr. Thompson, this is an illogical and unnecessary state of affairs. But we are getting ahead of his story. Here’s how—and why—Bradbury Thompson arrived at this unique design for Alphabet 26.

Brad Thompson’s experiments in designing a better alphabet began about fifteen years ago. The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower.

It was Mr. Thompson’s idea to combine the best upper- and lowercase letters into one simplified, unified alphabet using only 26 symbols. If this proposal were to be accepted, it would be the first step toward clarifying an alphabet that was designed by the Romans to express the sounds of Latin and became the staff of the English language.

Bradbury Thompson’s experiments were based on a simple precept. A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant. Yet the present alphabet flagrantly violates that basic precept.