However, as Wilks points out in his Introduction, "anyone with expertise in any particular subject will certainly be able to identify more in these images than I have intentionally included".įor competition purposes the book was accompanied by "The Ultimate Alphabet Workbook", a smaller, saddle-stitched volume containing a checklist of 12,000 words: the 7,777 words depicted in the paintings plus 4,223 that were not. Conversely, the same word may refer to more than one class of object: thus the " leg" of a tripod and the "leg" of a human being count as two separate words, and the image for K depicts several types of "king". A single object may be described by more than one word beginning with the same letter: for instance, a " dalmatian" is also a " dog" and a " witch" is also a " woman". Each letter is itself represented several times, typically in braille, morse code, semaphore, and sign language as well as in its printed form.Īccording to Wilks the book contained depictions of 7,777 words in totalranging from just 30 for the letter X to 1,229 for the letter S, taking a total of 18,000 hours to complete. Wilks himself appears at least once in every painting, as does his trademark snail. Unlike children's alphabet books, it contains unusual words, and is extremely intricately painted, with the paintings in a realistic style, but rendered surrealistic by the strange juxtaposition of subject matter. It was published in 1986 as a competition with a £10 000 prize, closing in 1988.
It is a collection of 26 paintings, each depicting a collection of objects starting with a particular letter of the alphabet. "The Ultimate Alphabet" (ISBN 1-85145-050-5) is a best-selling book by Mike Wilks.
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