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Worlds Unfolding: Science on the Page - Daniel Lewis, Jennifer Watts et al ****

Just occasionally you get a book (or in this case five and a bit books) that is genuinely different. In a slip case there are five books entitled Above, Beyond, Below, Alive and Within, along with a pamphlet including an introduction from Bill Nye (a name, I'm told, that will mean something if you are American). It's an attempt to put all of science into perspective, based on collections at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

I was a little wary after reading the Director's Foreword in the pamphlet. It opens 'Libraries are the deep memory of scientific practice, the wellspring that enables the histories of science, medicine and technology to be discovered, written and reinterpreted...' which feels more than a touch pretentious - a common enough reality when dealing with science/arts crossovers. As the Notes to the Reader tells us 'Our curatorial team wanted to break free of the chronological or linear approach that a single book dedicated to a discipline can (and often does) imply. There is no prescribed path for human curiosity or discovery as the materials herein make clear.' So I've gone with the slightly subscribed path of the order I came to the books, starting with Alive.

The book itself is divided into more of these single word, rather fragmented titles: Abound, Discern, Illustrate, Collect, Cultivate, Control, Share. We open with a couple of images from Eadweard Muybridge's work without any textual explanation. As might be expected, given this is a paper visualisation of exhibits in a museum/library, looking through it is a very visual experience, driven by images with text that sometimes doesn't add an awful lot to the experience. There are some great images - for example a page from a 1650 book attempting to use musical notation to capture birdsong or an 1884 picture of a saw for giant redwood trees.

Within (Layer, Labor, Detect, Heal, Judge, Jolt, Illuminate) moves on to medicine, anatomy and (rather oddly, electricity). Again, the images sometimes captivate, from 'woman with a Psycograph phrenology machine' - which looks just as weird as it sounds - to suitably horrendous anatomical drawings and (just in case you need it) a standard scale of urinary colours. Below takes us on to geology and oceanography, Beyond to exploration and sadly only a very tiny bit of science fiction, while Above takes in astronomy and aviation. 

It's very difficult to rate a book like this. It was a pleasant experience to pass through the imagery as you would exhibits in a museum. This is effectively a document-based museum in a box. I'm afraid I'm the kind of person who doesn't read many of the labels in a museum and similarly concentrated more on the pictures than the relatively thin text. But then, this set is not designed to tell you anything much about the science. So as popular science it should probably only get two stars. But as an experience I enjoyed it enough to give it four. You pays your money and you takes your choice, though ironically its format probably makes it unsuitable for its most obvious home: a library.

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