
Lionfish fry photographed by Steven Kovacs off Palm Beach, Florida, 2017

Lionfish fry photographed by Steven Kovacs off Palm Beach, Florida, 2017

Masques made with Seashells by Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626-79) (click for larger)
Previously pre-posted:
• Eyeway to Ell — a better paronamasia than this one…
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:
• Bullets and Butterflies – Mad Dog Killers: The Story of a Congo Mercenary, Ivan Smith (Helion / 30° South Publishers 2012)
• Jaundiced on George – George Orwell: English Rebel, Robert Colls (Oxford University Press 2013)
• Crabsody in View – RSPB Handbook of the Seashore, Maya Plass (Bloomsbury 2013)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
Previously pre-posted (please peruse):
• Slug is a Drug — Collins Complete Guide to British Coastal Wildlife (2012)
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:
• Bits of the Best – The Shorter Strachey, Lytton Strachey, ed. Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy (Oxford University Press 1980)
• Shaman On U! – Copendium: An Expedition into the Rock’n’Roll Underworld, Julian Cope (Faber and Faber 2012)
• Scorpions and Sea-Lords – Philip’s Guide to Seashells, A.P.H. Oliver, illustrated by James Nicholls (various)
• Spike-U-Like – The Cactus Handbook, Erik Haustein, translated by Pamela Marwood (Cathay Books 1988)
• Glasguitargang – Dog Eat Dog: A Story of Survival, Struggle and Triumph by the Man Who Put AC/DC on the World Stage, Michael Browning (Allen & Unwin 2014)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
I like this illustration of a scene in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) even more because it has at least one mistake in it. At least, I think it’s a mistake: the jellyfish on the upper left are two Portuguese men-o’-war (really colonial hydrozoans, not jellyfish). They have gas-filled float-bladders, so in reality you see them only on the surface, not hanging in midwater like that. The mistake makes the scene like a dream. The absence of colour is good too: it fixes the illustration firmly in the past and the colours you imagine are more vivid. The artist is imagining, dreaming, conjuring a vision of an oneiric ocean.

Solenostomus paradoxus (Pallas, 1770)
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents:
• Machina Mundi – The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, David Wootton (Allen Lane 2015)
• Wandering Wonders – Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World, Christian Sardet (The University of Chicago Press 2015)
• Love Buzz – A Buzz in the Meadow, Dave Goulson (Jonathan Cape 2014)
• Quake’s Progress – The Million Death Quake: The Science of Predicting Earth’s Deadliest Natural Disaster, Roger Musson (Palgrave Macmillan 2012)
• Sin after Cin – Gargoyle Girls from Beelzebub’s Ballsack: The Sickest, Sleaziest, Splanchnophagousest Slimefests in Scum Cinema, Dr Joan Jay Jefferson (TransToxic Texts 2016)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR