Word: kim
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...Kim devotes an entire section to Great Names in the annals of symmetry and self-reference. "MARTIN GARDNER" and "ASIMOV" both preserve their shape upside-down. Read "BORGES" a second time: It's "JORGE" written over "LUIS." And in a tip of the hat to Inversions's literary soulmate, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, Kim has created a series of appropriate representations of those three names...
...elicit the same awe and pleasure as the discovery of NINA's in a Hirschfeld cartoon, or the realization that Bow and Arrow Streets in Cambridge describe the shapes they form. There's nothing to solve in Inversions--no clues to disentangle or mazes to penetrate. The satisfaction of Kim's "inversions" comes from finding new significance and new wit in the seemingly commonplace...
...KIM HAS accompanied his images with a set of elegant essays on related subjects: symmetry, vision, the alphabet, the technique he uses to create inversions, and the analogies to his inversions that exist in music, art, and linguistics. Staying clear of jargon and specialized knowledge, these essays deftly challenge a great deal of what we take for granted about reading, and seeing in general. For instance, Kim poses the following "classical conundrum...
...essay on the alphabet, Kim throws another curveball. "Why do we call 'G' and 'g' the same letter when their shapes are so different?" he asks. "Look around at the alphabets in books and signs. If you think you understand what they all have in common, just try explaining how to recognize the letter 'G' to a non-Roman-alphabet-using person. Can you explain it without using pictures...
...sheer cleverness, the flashiest section of Kim's text is his discussion of the linguistic equivalent of the calligraphic inversion--the palindrome, a word or sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Starting with the most familiar type of palindrome, at the letter-level ("Able was I ere I saw Elba" is the best known of these), Kim goes on to write about word-palindromes (his example is "So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so") and, most fascinating of all, phonetic palindromes, which sound the same run backwards through a tape-recorder ("we revere you" and "ominous...