This stylish book is based on a simple idea: that straight lines are all around us and we just have to look closely to see them.

Imagine a square, shiny white, board book ‘snipped’ in a straight line from the middle of the back binding to the centre of the front cover. Next imagine it opened out, showing a ‘letterbox’ space across the centre of the spread. Finally think of how that space could be used as part of an image.

Illustrator Jimi Lee has had fun playing with this unusual format. She uses the first spread to show an outline of a clothes hanger, where the open space is the ‘hanging wire’ at the bottom. So simple but so effective as, when the book is held up to the light, it gives the hanger a luminous quality, making us see an everyday object in a new and different way.

Lee moves on to an even more effective image, that of two children on a see-saw. Here the letterbox space stands in for the plank of wood they are balancing on. If you tilt the book slightly, you get a sense of a tipping motion as the children play.

Other images follow, and in each case the open space is used in an imaginative new way. In one picture it is a diving board…

… in another it is the handle and interior of a frying pan, with an egg being tossed above it.

In yet another image, the line is a high bridge above open water. This adds a sense of danger as the car appears to be suspended in thin air between two clifftops.

Each picture shows a straight line as an integral part of an object or space. It invites the reader to become more aware of lines in the real world, and it might even encourage young children to use the technique to make their own images.

Jimi Lee was born in South Korea and studied graphic design in France. She is also the creator of Our Planet (2014), a wordless ‘environmental fairy tale’.