Fernando Pessoa & Co playing cards

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) ranks with the most important Modernist poets of the 20th century. His celebrity is partly due to the way in which he wrote his work, using different names, or 'heteronyms', corresponding to various personalities which he invented. "A poet is a pretender", he wrote in a famous poem.

Some of the verse extracts which appear in this pack of cards belong to those other personalities of Pessoa's world: Alberto Caiero, Álvaro de Campos, Bernardo Soares and Ricardo Reis.

The designer of the pack, Pedro Baptista, succeeds well in capturing the essence of a poet's mind in a visual form. The verses are set in a typewriter font, aesthetically quaint and unpretentious, against soft, unfocused 'photograms' occupying the entire card face. This conveys a sense of thoughts floating in imaginary dimensions of space - cyberspace perhaps. Corner indices, also in typewriter, and discrete pips finish off the arrangement. On the back, an ink splotch on a pale cream background, fallen no doubt from the poet's poised pen, conspiring, with the typewriter, against modern technology.