About the Original
The Alphabet for Geniuses is a little
Beholder project from around about 1992.
It started as a silly and simple idea - to do a variation on the appalling
alphabets that go up in nurseries, by mimicking the style but putting more
weighty things into it. We did it first as a long, colourful frieze (for
prodigies' nurseries, of course) and later as a T-shirt, and raised some
money for a couple of children's charities with it. The timing was inspired
by several of my contemporaries producing children, all at roughly the same
time, in a manner which suggested an epidemic.
Over about six months it sat as twenty-six piles of coloured paper in my office, with the current best-idea on top of each pile. People would come in and shuffle them about and make their suggestions, leaving their favoured contributions above the less popular ones. It turned out that most of my friends seem to be geniuses only in their own field, which made the whole thing rather subjective. Anyway, by the end of this process, the suggestions which were extant were used to create the final alphabet of one picture per letter.
The original joke worked best on the wall of a nursery, because at first glance it's not obvious that this is anything other than your regular alphabet. Perhaps it's not funny on the web. You don't have to look at it.