The Universe A Graphic Guide - Jillian Scudder and Lily Fossett ***

I've always loved the 'introducing X, a graphic guide' series from Icon Books, with titles such as Introducing Infinity: a graphic guide. They're quirky, pocket-sized books with typically one or two page segments each featuring an eye-catching illustration. However, the publisher also has a set of graphic guides that are full-sized books, the latest being The Universe.

I was also very impressed with Jillian Scudder's illustrated Astroquizzical - she knows her stuff and puts the science across well. The same is true here - it's hard to fault the basics of the text. But I found the book a pain to read because of the way it's laid out and illustrated. Frankly, the layout (and cover) make it look more like a self-published book than one that's professionally produced.

The text and image layout is haphazard, with random switching of fonts. Headings are few and far between - there is no apparent structure to the book. In a lot of cases, the illustrations got it the way of the text rather than usefully illustrating it, or acting as quirky asides. It didn't help that there are end notes using Roman numerals. But when you look, they aren't really end notes, they are just references.

Frankly, a book like this doesn't really need references, but if there are to be end notes, they need to have some accompanying text to make some sense of them: these don't. The most bizarre example is that one of the headings has an end note. So we get the heading '300 million years ago^ciii' and when you follow the end note we are given a reference to a journal that doesn't even give the name of the paper - it adds nothing but confusion to the heading.

I really wanted to like this book, but the format simply doesn't work for it.

Paperback:

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