Coffee Table Book of: Sharks (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Sharks is a large-format coffee table book in black and white: sharks, printed edge to edge, one picture to a page.

It opens with the attack, and with the reason it comes from below: the light comes from above, so a dark back vanishes against the depths while anything above is drawn in outline. A breach is the end of a vertical charge begun far down, the animal committing at full speed and carrying clear of the surface.

Then the shapes, which are the argument of the book: the hammer held out sideways, the scythe tail longer than the body that swings it, the enormous filter-feeder that eats nothing it has to chase. Then speed, and the eye, and the animals at rest.

Then the numbers: a spiral of hammerheads receding into deep water, and a school turning together far above any bottom.

And then the close range (the skin, the scars, the teeth that sit outside a closed mouth, an egg case anchored to rock by its tendrils) before the book ends in silhouette and last light.

Short notes run through the book. Each one is about the animal rather than the picture: why the mako keeps its swimming muscle warmer than the sea, why a shark sinks the moment it stops swimming, and why the largest sharks eat the smallest prey.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.