Butterfly Alphabet

The Butterfly Alphabet is a photographic artwork by the Norwegian naturalist Kjell Bloch Sandved.

[1] Sandved worked at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and came up with the idea with Barbara Bedette, a paleontologist, of finding all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and the Arabic numerals 0 to 9 in the patterns on the wings of butterflies.

Sandved's photographic excursions led him to Brazil, Congo, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

Searching for the forms took him over 24 years,[2] but he finished the collection in 1975 and published it in the Smithsonian Magazine.

It was republished by Scholastic, as a book in 1996, with accompanying snippets about butterfly species.