The life of legendary Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré is so shrouded in speculation that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure whose name will forever be linked with the well-known printer's error. Yet as scholar Lytle Shaw reveals in "The Moiré Effect," when it comes to Monsieur Moiré and his circle, fact is often stranger than fiction. Tracking the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures--including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolf Steiner and several members of the secretive Chadwick family--"The Moiré Effect" takes readers on a journey from the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi to the dusty bowels of ancient archives to a conclusion as hair-raising as it is oblique.