Planetwatch

This glossy volume carries the Blue Peter logo and presents itself as the same sort of bumper assortment as its TV counterpart – allegedly, that is, for I was a pre-war baby and Before Singleton. The authors and their support system of editors, consultants and designers have piled everything into a gallimaufry of phenomena, remarkabilia, projects, and solutions, raiding a closely-packed pageful of photo-agencies to ‘illustrate’ it. So much so that the many images draw the eye and the gobbets of text end up illustrating them; just shows it’s a funny old world which, I suppose, is the point of this collection.

It contains masses of facts, many under-explained (how do you pronounce Przewalski? – this book isn’t going to tell you) and all jammed together in restless pro- and con-fusion. What it needs is a minutely good index – the one page provided isn’t nearly exhaustive enough. Trying to get sequential development of information, though, is exhausting and loss of patience soon leads to random browsing. Given the amount of well-expressed ideas available, one wonders if this contribution is either helpful or necessary. Personally I’d rather spend a tenner on sticky-back plastic (no ‘plastic’ in the index, though).