When "A" is for weathered wood

A lovely new book (illustrated by Jean Holabird and with a luminous forward by Brain Boyd) lets us in on Nabokov's synesthesiac sense of the alphabet:

Vladimir Nabokov could hear color. As he described it –

perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites.

(via Bookish)