And now a different kind of book from what I usually blog about. Actually I am a little bit in love with collecting art books so I thought I'd post about some art books I've been drooling over and which would make good christmas/hanukkah gifts for science geeks/illustration lovers/art students.
Ernst Haeckel is a big name in biology. According to wikipedia he named thousands of new species and "coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista". He also was an artist and his book "Kunstformen der Natur, "Artforms of Nature") has over 100 detailed pictures of animals, especially sea creatures. Even if you aren't into biology – it's gorgeous.
I am not sure how I came upon this book. I think it was random surfing from one blog to a site about bird illustration to googling Haeckel to some other website to looking it up on amazon. Anyway, somewhere in there, I stumbled upon a german site which had a lot of his illustrations scanned and viewable as jpgs along with a pdf file which I think is the whole book in german. Then, randomly a day or so after finding out it was on Amazon (see link to the left), I found this book at anthropologie of all places, and I was surprised because all the illustrations are very nicely done in glossy paper and they are all in one place after a nice introduction about Haeckel and his life, but also the book itself is also a little oversized, which is good - you can really see the detail in the pictures. It shall be mine.
P.S. For more biological books online (including Haeckel's) go to www.biolab.de where you can find cool stuff like this.
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