Christopher Stocks

A beautifully illustrated short book (collection of short essays) about the idea of pebbles as art (and more prosaically ornaments), with reference to Picasso, Hepworth, Moore, Kettles Yard in Cambridge and Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden.
This is supplemented with a very short chapter on different types of pebbles (no photographs, so not very useful, and Stocks refers to the recently republished The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter's Guide) and a brief chapter on a few good beaches in the UK to collect pebbles.
It only provides a couple of hours reading, but I enjoyed this slight book as it is a satisfying combination of illustrations and short essays.… (mehr)

48/2021. The Book of Pebbles by Christopher Stocks (author) and Angie Lewin (illustrator), which is a non-fiction book on the natural history and art of pebbles. Stocks' text washes around Lewin's art like waves on the shore. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote about Barbara Hepworth comparing her paramour Ben Nicholson's head to "the most lovely pebble ever seen". At under 100 pages, if we discount the filler at the back, this book is small but perfectly formed, like a pebble.

Quotes

"Sometimes at night I lie in bed and listen to pebbles being made. The sound is uncanny, yet oddly comforting, like the slow deep breath of a slumbering giant - or more prosaically, as they used to say on the Isle of Portland, like everyone in Weymouth swishing their curtains open and closed at the same time;"

Lmao: (...) "the nineteenth century was dismissed as a purgatory of smoke and stovepipe hats, blacking factories and bewhiskered patriarchs in funereal suits," (...)

Lol, have y'all seen that "prof or hobo" meme? Well: "Enthusiastically bearded, with his clothes in an apparently chronic state of mild disarray, Tandy embodies the Platonic ideal of a geologist," (...)… (mehr)

This entertaining read gives some great anecdotal stories about some of our best loved fruit and vegetables in Britain, and how as a nation we came to acquire them and in what form and how tastes and aesthetics have changed over time. The book is divided into chapters for each individual fruit and veg, each beginning with a potted history then discussing a few 'forgotten' varieties such as the lemon apple cucumber: spherical, bright yellow with tiny black spines. If you want to get excited about fruit and veg and inspire yourself to grow some- giving you the choice not offered by the supermarkets- pick up this book! I've taken to reading this book out loud to my boyfriend while he cooks, but I think he's prefer to watch it on the T.V as a series as even my best 'reading-out-loud' voice doesn't do it justice!… (mehr)