Today I finished the 400th book since I began tracking my reading back in 2016. Of course, I generally do not count towards my ‘Books Read’ total those volumes belonging to the Comics & Graphic Novels category, so in my self-approved count, this book is #351. The slim staple-bound almost-a-pamphlet in question is Life on a Coral Reef, by Russ Kinne. It is part of a “Nature Program” series put out in the 1950s by the National Audobon Society, and included in each of the series a set of color stamps with photos accompanying the text, gummed on the back so that the reader could paste them into the book. In this case the stamps had not been pasted in, perhaps because the pictures just weren’t that good. I append below one of the pages of these stamps, so that you can compare with modern underwater photography and see the immense improvements since 1956, when Book #351 (or #400, but we’re not counting that way) was published.
Leave a comment