Beautiful Shells: George Perry’s Conchology

In the 19th century, Perry published Conchology, or the Natural History of Shells, which was filled with hundreds of illustrations and descriptions of mollusk shells. This book reproduces some of that work, but Carnall (collections manager, Oxford Univ. Museum of Natural History) engagingly tells a story as spiraled and elegant as the shells on each page. He emphasizes the strange liminality of conch shells, equally at home in ephemeral spaces—gift shops, for example—as they are in oceanside sands and scientific treatises. With playfully alliterative prose, a conversational tone, and plenty of illustrations, this book invites readers into the chambers of mollusks to discover the life that exists in and around shells. Instead of viewing shells as artifacts or even as ornaments, readers will be able to envision them as elegant solutions to the interior creature’s natural dilemma of how to merge a growing body with a fixed-size shell.