The Ultimate Alphabet

Mike Wilks

This is the majority of the letter S, the most complicated image from Mike Wilks’ 1986 book The Ultimate Alphabet. In the 30 × 40" acrylic painting Wilks included 1234 words that began with S. The original edition of the book included a contest to see who could correctly identify all 7777 of the words throughout his abecderium.¹

Mike Wilks (b. 1947) began art school on scholarship at age 13 and after studying for seven years he began a career as a graphic designer, founding the London design agency TWD. In 1975 he sold TWD and began a second career illustrating books.

His first major commission was for Brian Aldiss’ epic poem Pile – Petals From Saint Klaed’s Computer, published in 1979.² With a single exception, all of the 32 illustrations were done in pen and ink, which Wilks felt was his most accomplished medium. The intricate detail and the almost Bosch or Dali sense of surrealism are what made the book something of a cult classic, and are characteristic of all of Wilks’ work:

On the heels of Britain’s armchair treasure hunt craze, spurred by Kit Williams wildly successful 1979 book Masquerade, Wilks approached his publisher with the idea of a puzzle book based around finding all of the words in a series of paintings for each letter of the alphabet. Wilks spent four years researching and painting the 26 acrylic canvases and the book, The Ultimate Alphabet, was published in 1986. It became a bestseller, eventually selling more than 750,000 copies. WHSmith even listed it as the “most shop-lifted title” of the year.

The letter A – 360 words

The letter J – 102 words

The letter Q – 309 words

The letter Y – 74 words

In 1988, after the contest was completed, Wilks published The Annotated Ultimate Alphabet, which included the key to the words:³

The letter J – 102 words

Readers identified many new words that Wilks did not consciously paint and in 1992 new editions of the Ultimate and Annotated Alphabet were published, including a revised list of 8050 words.

During the rest of the decade Wilks completed a trilogy of puzzle books, The Ultimate Noah’s Ark was published in 1995 and The Ultimate Spot-the-Difference Book in 1998. The Ultimate Noah’s Ark included one large, monstrously complex picture (albeit divided into 16 details) with 707 animals, all paired except one.⁴ The contest was simply to identify the missing animal:

The Ultimate Spot-the-Difference Book included 12 paintings, representing the stages of life.⁵ Each page was printed twice and digitally manipulated to include changes – up to 75 on text pages and up to 250 on the images. The puzzle (a contest was held only by the UK publisher) was to identify these changes. Although much of the iconography and design themes are similar to Wilks earlier work, these images are even more surreal and dark:

Nativity

Lucifer’s Garden

The Glowing Assassins Take Pride in their Work

Sadly, all of Wilks’s picture books are now out of print. He stated: “there is no enthusiasm in the publishing world of today for this kind of book as they are costly to publish and a lot more bother than the staple diet of today’s lists.” More recently he has turned to young adult fiction, writing the fantasy series Mirrorscape.

1. Wilks, Mike. The Ultimate Alphabet. London: Pavilion, 1986, or, New York; Henry Holt, 1986. Original printings included the Ultimate Alphabet Workbook, a 12,000-word checklist to fill out for the contest. The contest, which closed 1 Apr 1988, was scored as right minus wrong. Not surprisingly, the winner was the one with the fewest wrong answers.

2. Aldiss, Brian, Wilks, Mike (illus.). Pile – Petals From Saint Klaed’s Computer. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979. or, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979.

3. Wilks, Mike. The Annotated Ultimate Alphabet. London: Pavilion Books, 1988, or, New York: Henry Holt, 1988. If you ae looking for just one Ultimate Alphabet title, this is the one to get.

4. Wilks, Mike. The Ultimate Noah’s Ark. London: Michael Joseph, 1994, or, New York: Henry Holt, 1984. The book was also available in Europe on a Philip’s CD-i, remember those? I though so. The answer to the contest, which closed 1 Feb 1995, was the tamandua or lesser anteater, pictured on the tambourine held by the elephant shrew.

5. Wilks, Mike. The Ultimate Spot-the-Difference Book. London: Penguin Studio, 1997, or, Metamorphosis – The Ultimate Spot-the-Difference Book. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

2 Feb 2010 ‧ Illustration