The vowel E is used more than five times oftener than any other letter, so imagine an entire book written with the E type-bar of the typewriter tied down, thus making it impossible for that letter to be printed. This was done so that none of that vowel might slip in when Ernest Vincent Wright typed his 50,000-word novel "Gadsby".
This book is the gold standard for lipograms - not for the plot or the narrative but the author's sheer wondrous achievement. One of Wright's greatest difficulties was past tense verbs, as almost all of them end with "...ed". Substitudes were few, such as "said" for "replied" or "answered" or "asked". The book took five and a half month to write.
Hasn't this been a morning well spent? You learnt not about F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" but Ernest Vincent Wright's "Gadsby", and learnt not to mistake lipogram for what you wanted your wife to have.
