Shells may not be the type of book one expects in Leonardo Reviews. At first sight it is more a (medium-sized) coffee table book, beautifully illustrated and containing everything one ever wanted to know about shells (here defined as “the hard, protective outer cases of molluscs or crustaceans,” p. 6), from a natural, as well as cultural, point of view, with chapters on, for instance, the shell makers (a seductively presented taxonomy of mollusks), the various uses (aesthetic, ritual, religious, economic) of shells, or the changes of shell life in a changing world (here and now, but also there, before and later).
It would be very unfair, however, to label this astonishing publication in this vaguely middlebrow way, for Shells is not a publication to merely admire or look at, even if the book does not have a real thesis to defend or a research question to develop— except perhaps...