This article is an exploration of the large repertoire of knowledge and strategies for meaning-making that reader/viewers must possess (or be in the process of learning to possess) in order to make sense of the relatively simple information provided by even the simplest of alphabet books. The complex relationships between real objects and concepts, their visual images, the sounds that represent them in language, the visual symbols that represent those sounds, and the names we provide for those sounds make the act of decoding any alphabet book a form of puzzle–and thus, allow creative writers and illustrators to produce intriguingly sophisticated versions of the genre.