The letters of a name outlived everyone who wrote them.
A text built from the biographies of a name's own letters. J is barely five centuries old. Z was thrown out of the Latin alphabet and let back in at the end. G has a named inventor and a date. If they are in the name, they are in the text.
For giving to someone who has everything. A text about their own name is the one thing nobody has.
A letter says nothing about the person carrying it, and any text claiming otherwise is invented. We went the other way: the letter itself has a biography, and it is documented.
J — the youngest letter of the alphabet. Split off from I in the sixteenth century; Shakespeare's first editions have none.
G — one of the very few letters with a named inventor and a date: a Roman schoolmaster around 230 BC.
Z — Latin threw it out as useless, then let it back in centuries later, at the end, where there was room. That is why the alphabet finishes on it.
F, U, V, W, Y — five English letters descend from one Phoenician letter, waw. One ancestor split five ways.
What is inside
A route through the name, left to right. Every letter in the position it is written in.
Where the letter came from — Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan, or invented outright, with the original picture where it is known: an ox, a house, water, an eye, a tooth.
What happened to it since — removed, restored, split, merged, or left alone for three thousand years.
Rare letters — how many surnames in the corpus carry the same letter. J appears in 3 per cent of them.
How it comes
A two-spread text: only the letters with something to tell get a long section, the rest keep the rhythm in a line.
A PDF, ready to print and to read on a screen.
Together with the print file it makes a gift that cannot be duplicated: ALPHABET + OBJECT — $39 instead of $48.
What is not here
Letter psychology. No "K is strength", no "A is leadership". That is invented, and we will not print it.
Numerology. The Latin alphabet never carried numeric values, so no number is offered.
Invented history. Where the origin is disputed, the text says it is disputed.