Alphabet City by Stephen Johnson (1995)

At first glance the images from Alphabet City appear to be photographs, but upon closer examination, they are actually highly detailed paintings.  Each painting represents and aspect of city life, with the a C hidden in a cathedral's rose window, the M as a bridge support, and T as the spaces between a building.  The images are gorgeous, but more importantly, preschoolers have a lot of fun finding the letters in the picture.  When I used it in preschool storytime I selected letters that started the names of the attending kids, and they got very excited finding "their" letters in the book.  We practiced tracing the letters in the air and on the carpet, as well as tracing them in the book.  The parent message was simple, "you don't need to have a book in front of you to practice Letter Knowledge - you can use anything around you!"

- Natasha Forrester