Optical Illusion Trick Notebook NOUTO / nouto

• Illusion count: 30 optical illusion tricks
• New works in this edition: 13 (revised best edition)
• Dimensions: 252 × 179 × 4 mm (L × W × D)
• Material: Paper
• Packaging: Individual packaging
• Made in: Japan

It started with a casual Facebook post. Mozu, then a junior high school student and already a diorama animator, had doodled a triangular ruler so convincingly three-dimensional that his father shared it online almost as a joke. Nouto's Takagi saw it and proposed turning the doodles into a notebook-format collection, funded through crowdfunding.

The concept is simple: a notebook that is not really for writing. Each page holds one trompe-l'oeil drawing, ranging from easy to challenging, and the whole point is to photograph it. Through a camera lens the illusions become startlingly convincing in a way they are not when viewed directly, which makes the book an ongoing game rather than a static art object.

This revised best edition gathers 30 tricks in total, with 13 new works drawn after the original release, making it a definitive collection of Mozu's illusion doodles. The lineup includes a floating coin, a pen apparently drawing in mid-air, a 90-degree rainbow, and a comic-book character stepping off the page.