United States
£ GBP
London’s Natural History Museum holds the oldest and most important entomology collection in the world – with over 34 million insect and arachnid specimens. Interesting Insects showcases the weird, wonderful, and often surprisingly beautiful world of bugs, from shimmering stag beetles to dazzling dragonflies. For each stunning specimen there is a close-up photograph and accompanying text describing its appearance, lifestyle, distribution and size, together with its key characteristics.
"This book is essentially an eclectic collection of full-page colour photographs of specimens from the Natural History Museum's entomological collection, set on a white be a background. These startling insect portraits are accompanied by a short pen portrait of the relevant insect, covering common name, Latin name, size, distribution and a few factoids about the subject. [...] Above all this book is a collection of striking colours and strange shapes, lovingly photographed and explained with choice words from four scientists with curator roles at the Natural History Museum. If you were to choose some people to pick out the choicest specimens from within the 34 million specimens held by the museum then these are the experts you would choose to find them, though you would also have expected a more and discernible order to their display and standardisation of the information provided about each species. [...] Interesting Insects is not a reference book and more of a coffee table book though its size at just over A5 perhaps belies this role. It does include plenty of all things bright, beautiful and idiosyncratic that will engage readers young and old. [...]"
– Paul Hetherington, Atropos 68, 2021
