With meticulous artistry and subtle humor, Maurits Cornelis Escher created worlds whose absurd, impeccably principled physics and rogue geometries mock our perception of reality. In those worlds, walls, floors, and ceilings may share the same planes; “flat,” interlocking beasts achieve three dimensions, only to subside again into their paper prisons; and every surface has the elasticity of a balloon.

Born into a family of scientists and engineers, Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972) intended to study architecture. But a professor directed his interest toward the graphic arts, to our lasting benefit. In his early work, Escher largely took architecture--the built architecture of cityscapes and monumental buildings, and the way they interacted with the accidental structure of the rocks they were founded on--as his subject. But in the 1930s his eye turned inward, focusing on his interest in geometric rhythm and the ambiguities and contradictions of perception. He delighted in confounding our perceptions and assumptions by conjuring plausible impossibilities in which things make sense for an instant--until we realize, for instance, that they are sensible only in the context of a physics that doesn’t apply on this planet.

This folio of notecards offers two prime examples of Escher’s good-natured assaults on the possible. Ten black-and-white 5 x 7" blank notecards (5 each of 2 styles) with envelopes in a decorative folio.