Scrutinizing these weird, wonderful, ridiculous, occasionally creepy works of art isn't gonna get old anytime soon. I can't wait to share this with my friend. We did that all the time, and I always secretly thought we were cheating. I also love how the artist encourages finding creative answers in his pictures. It's easy to see why some were left out (I mean. I cannot adequately communicate the excitement I felt when I made the discovery, because the game doesn't have the pictures for every letter. Either one of us could have beaten an inexperienced player without even looking at the pictures (and I bet I still could, for the letter P).Īnyway, I never knew until recently that the pictures for the game were taken from this book. I mean, we played this thing all the time. Then cross out your common answers, and whoever has the most left wins. The viewer is set the challenge of spotting as many objects or actions beginning with that letter of the alphabet as possible. It consists of 26 pictures, one for each letter of the alphabet. List as many as you can before the timer runs out. This book was a massive craze back in the 1980s.

Study a picture of things that all begin with a single letter of the alphabet. One volume presents the paintings with introductory text by the artist the other offers the keyed drawings and alphabetical lists of words.Long ago, a friend and I were obsessed with this game called Scrutineyes. The Ultimate Alphabet was published in 1986 and the contest was to correctly identify all 7777 words from a 12,000-word workbook. Now, The Ultimate Alphabet: Complete Edition brings these two volumes together in this deluxe slipcase edition. The images in this book were first published in 1986 in the best-selling The Ultimate Alphabet, and later in The Annotated Ultimate Alphabet, in which keys to the images were included. Numbered line drawings accompanied by lists of words serve as keys to the paintings. The reader need not go crazy, however, trying to name all of the words represented in the images (at last count, 7,825!). Each image contains hundreds of items all starting with the same letter.

His four-year painting odyssey resulted in a suite of magnificent compilations, all minutely detailed, masterfully rendered, and slightly surreal. The artist Mike Wilks set out in the 1980s to depict as many words as possible in twenty-six images corresponding to the alphabet.

The ultimate alphabet book