S24: Sea Shells

Interesting little hardcover from the Biblio-Mat this week:

She sells something something something.

Title: Sea Shells

Billed as having 350 illustrations, the Grosset All-Color Guide – Sea Shells by S. Peter Dance, published in 1973, is a neat little hardcover for those with a love of conchology. The 156 page hardcover contains pretty much everything one would ever need to know about seashells, from how they form, to all the different types, to how to buy and sell them.

Everything you never knew you wanted to know.

Yep, that's a shell alright.

 

From the layout of the chapters to the muted colour illustrations, everything about it screams 70’s youth education book. There’s nothing wrong with the illustrations – they look fairly detailed and I’m sure they’re accurate, but the fact that the book did not contain a single photograph is interesting since it probably would’ve been easier and cheaper to commission a photographer than an artist to provide images.

Cartoons as a kid made this out to be more common than it really is.

Clam chowder looks pretty good about now.

Flipping through the pages, the text is split into short entries, which made it easy and quick to read. Even just delving into a few entries I learned some interesting things, like how there’s actually an industry that makes fabric out of mollusk fibers. Mostly, though, it just made me hungry for mussels and oysters.