Reading for longer visits
The Cloud Spotter's Guide
by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Image courtesy of Amazon.co.uk
How many of us have spent hours lying in open fields staring at the clouds on a summers day, thinking "That one looks like a giraffe", or "That one is the spitting image of my ex-girlfriend, before she put on all the weight and started shagging around behind my back"?
It turns out more than just a few, to the extent where Gavin Pretor-Pinney, editor of BITB favourite 'The Idler' decided to do something about it. In 2004, at a literature festival in Cornwall, he launched the Cloud Appreciation Society, with a manifesto to "pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it", and "remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere's moods, and can be read like those of a person's countenance", amongst others.
Two years on, The Cloud Appreciation Society, no doubt going from strength to strength what with all the weather we've been having recently, have released "The Cloudspotters Guide", as their inaugural publication, and shows without any room for doubt that the Society do indeed appreciate our celestial fluffy friends, to the extent where Pretor-Pinney has produced a marvellous book regardless of whether your interest is purely from a dreamy staring out of the train window on a weekend trip to Croydon perspective, or a desire to be able to tell your altostratus from your altocumulus.
Well illustrated with a mixture of hand-drawn illustrations and black and white images, the clouds suffer a little perhaps from the lack of colour, but a 'quiz' section in the middle is made up of colour plates. It wins major BITB points by being hardback but paperback size, and by being broken down into managable chunks and chapters by classification of cloud types. Whilst good for dipping into, I have found myself on a number of occasions taking the book with me from the bathroom to read more, it could definately benefit from a bookmark.
Matthew Knight