Coffee Table Book of: Wings of the Sea (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Wings of the Sea is a large-format coffee table book in black and white: rays and flatfish, printed edge to edge, one picture to a page.

It begins with the shape, because the shape is the whole animal, a disc rather than a body with fins, seen from below with the wings at full span, and from above as an outline moving over sand.

Then how it moves. A ray flies rather than swims: some beat the wings like a bird, some ripple a margin and hold the disc still, and a gliding ray loses height slowly for the same reason a glider does, momentum is cheap and beating is expensive.

Then the underside, which is where a ray keeps almost everything that matters: the row of evenly spaced gill openings, the mouth, and a face that is not a face. The eyes are on top and see none of it.

Then the floor, and the other half of the book. A buried ray under a thin layer of sand is not hiding from view so much as waiting, because everything that walks across that sand is prey. Beside it lie the flatfish, which solved the same problem from the opposite direction, a peacock flounder dissolving into the sand with both eyes raised, a plaice on gravel, a turbot mottled until it is nearly invisible against the tone. One animal went flat by spreading; the other went flat by lying down.

And the tail curls forward over the ray’s own back in a defensive arc, the strike is upward, and nothing is hunted with it.

Short notes run through the book. Each one is about the animal rather than the picture, why a skate’s egg case is anchored by its horns, why a migrating aggregation reads from above as one dark shape, and why a ray backlit is outline only, which is also how nearly everything beneath one sees it.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.