The photographs in this book spring from a respect for the logic and clarity of science and the order and variety of the natural world and from the photographer's fascination with the array of line, form, and pattern that occurs in our daily lives. Talismans are endowed with magic virtue, charms diverse in their forms, holding the powers of healing or good fortune or potent magic, tinged always with a hint of the occult, the mysterious.

Drawn from the everyday world, changed through the alchemy of photography and the eye of the artist, these images remind us that sometimes the quotidian is the strangest of all.