Friday, March 6, 2009

Daily Book Graphics #14 / The Splendid Savage of the Sea

When I was a kid The Undersea World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau series on PBS made a huge impression on me. I love the way Jacques Cousteau and his crew appeared to wander the world following their own impulse towards inquiry. This book is one in a series published in 1970. The photographs are not of a very high quality as the printing standards of the time were vastly inferior to the present. The most compelling part of the book are the illustrations in the appendix.


These illustrations come from a section entitled Appendix B: Drawings of Ships, Sharks, and Seagoing Equipment.

The cut away diagram reminds me of the sequence in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, where the camera pans across a life size cut-away of a Calypso like ship.

How they filmed sharks feeding. These illustrations aren't particularly well done, they almost have a Jack Chick quality.

Enemies of the shark (click to enlarge, you'll see more)

Enemies of the shark detail
The text refers to sharks being attacked by "alligators found at the entrance of Africa's rivers," of course they mean crocodiles, it's a weird mistake to find in this kind of book. Perhaps we can blame it on the translator. Mixing up crocodiles and alligators is one of my pet peeves, although it is way more forgivable than interchangeably using monkey and ape, I previously ranted about that here.

This depicts the relative size various shark species compared to one another and to people.

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