Sunday book review – The Secret Language of Birds by Colin Rees

This is an interesting and attractive book which does, though, have one significant snag.

I know the author and have worked with him, and so it’s not surprising that I warmed to the book immediately, and I’ve published with Thames & Hudson (Remarkable Birds) and it was such a pleasant experience that I was further well-disposed to this volume of beautiful images and fascinating accounts of the role that birds have played in human art and culture.

Birds are simply brilliant and any book which celebrates their beauty, their character, their biology, is likely to be a winner with me. Colin Rees has assembled many facts and anecdotes to explore the depth of penetration of birds into our art and culture. It’s not that surprising that birds play such an important role given that they are found pretty numerously and obviously, almost everywhere on Earth, and sing, fly and are of a size to be noticeable and of a character to be generally friendly and sometimes companionable. Birds are simply brilliant!

The artwork assembled here to illustrate birds’ cultural significance comes from across the world, from many modern and ancient cultures and is therefore diverse but is also very beautiful. The publisher has done their accustomed job of producing a visually stunning work.

So what’s the significant snag? The snag is the font. I don’t pay much attention to fonts, and I’d say that is how it should be because the font carries the words which express the author’s thoughts and its job is to get those thoughts into the reader’s head as smoothly as possible. The font used here, whose name I haven’t found, gets in the way as it uses ligatures to link pairs of letters in words, often, but not only, digraphs (in fact, I gather, heterogenous consonant digraphs). These are letter combinations such as sh, gh and ck but the same has been applied to ct. Here is an example, or actually 14 examples;

I’ve never seen a book so over-ligatured and I echo a friend’s question of ‘Why?’.

The cover? The book is full of gorgeous artwork and yet the cover doesn’t quite do it for me. I fear for the crane in a steep dive and the left side-bar shows four different species each with a disconcerting look about them. I’d only give it 5/10 considering the wealth of images available inside these covers.

The Secret Language of Birds: art, nature and symbolism by Colin Rees is published by Thames & Hudson.