The Ultimate Alphabet: Complete Edition

The artist Mike Wilks set out in the 1980s to depict as many words as possible in twenty-six images corresponding to the alphabet. His four-year painting odyssey resulted in a suite of magnificent compilations, all minutely detailed, masterfully rendered, and slightly surreal. Each image contains hundreds of items all starting with the same letter. The reader need not go crazy, however, trying to name all of the words represented in the images (at last count, 7,825!). Numbered line drawings...