Shells

Natural History, Dec, 2007 by Laurence A. Marschall

Shells by Paul Starosta and Jacques Senders (Firefly Books; $85.00)

The Shell: A World of Decoration and Ornament by Ingrid Thomas (Thames & Hudson; $65.00)

These opulent books document two of the world's most dazzling collections of shells. Shells, photographed by Paul Starosta, showcases the one malacologists Jacques and Rita Senders assembled over fifty years of travel and diving. There's a brief introductory essay by architect Paolo Portoghesi, noting how the shell has influenced art and building, from King Solomon's Temple to the Sydney Opera House. But the real treasure of this book is more than 300 pages of heart-stopping photographs. Starosta has posed every specimen against a black background, fit dramatically from the front and above, and sometimes from behind as well, to emphasise symmetries in shape and nuances in color. Leafing through the pages, the senses are overloaded with variations on a few repeating themes: hearts, spirals, fans, undulating ribbons, ovoids, and cones, as well as phantasmagorical forms with spikes and excrescences that seem to deliberately defy any notion of regularity. Some shell surfaces seem to bear the monochrome glaze of primitive pottery; others are as crowded with iridescent jewels as a Faberge egg.

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Ingrid Thomas, an artist and conchologist, draws from her extensive collection and research in The Shell: A World of Decoration and Ornament, but while the illustrations here are as meticulously reproduced as Starosta's photographs, Thomas's book is far more than a gallery of natural forms. Thomas provides an ample text and more than 500 photographs and art reproductions to show how shells and shell-like forms have been used in jewelry, pottery, domestic design, and a wide variety of other decorative and fine arts from prehistoric times to the present. What difficulty Thomas must have had choosing only 500 examples of this lovely craftsmanship! Should she have left out the ornate cup made from a nautilus shell in early seventeenth-century Holland, cut to the shape of an ostrich's body, with neck, head, and legs made of pure gold? Or the pectoral ornament from New Guinea, embroidered with hundreds of cowrie and nassa shells? Or the Art Nouveau alabaster table fight sculpted in the shape of a conch shell, with a young maiden emerging, Venus-like, from its interior? Looking at what Thomas did include, one can only wish for a book with twice as many pages, and perhaps for coffee tables twice as strong.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.