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If you’re anything like us, you’ve encountered a bizarre illustration or two in the many textbooks you’ve pretended to peruse over the years. But these incredible surreal illustrations by Karl Nicholason for Communications Research Machines textbooks in the early 1970s, which we spotted over at 50 Watts, might just take the cake, weirdness-wise. After all, they look more like illustrations from some cracked version of Alice in Wonderland than they do images from any textbook we’ve ever seen. After the jump, check out a few of our favorites from the set, and then head here to see more of Nicholason’s work.

Illustration by Karl Nicholason. From Developmental Psychology Today, 1971.Figure 20.8: “The adolescent may show a calm exterior, which often hides a raging inner turmoil.”