The reception of the book was positive. Robert M. Mengel in Scientific American wrote "[the author] has organized this unique and beautiful book from the corpus of marvelous spacefilling periodic drawings made over two decades by the artist Maurits C. Escher. Adding a few specially drawn for this work, Escher has here given us the classical crystal groups in the plane, and a good many more that exploit the latest extensions to color symmetry, foreseen by the artist before mathematicians had officially recognized and classified them."