I never review reference books, but this one….oh man. It’s a collection of snowflakes, but not just any snowflakes. This book contains 2,453 unique and authentic photographs of snowflakes that one man captured way back in the winters before 1931.

We live in the day of the perpetual photo: your smartphone captures more angles of memories than your own brain could handle. Probably.

But what did people do ninety years ago, almost a century before smartphones and digital cameras, and decades before the simple 35mm film cameras? Well people like W.A. Bentley pulled out their massive box cameras and painstakingly shot and developed every single photograph they took. They cut the film when necessary. They wasted nothing.

Their process took days, even weeks, and when the photo-subjects were something as tiny and fragile as snowflakes on a piece of velvet, well, even the English language in 2020 can’t describe the patience it took for Bentley to photograph and publish a book of this magnitude.

The textual information published in this book about snowflakes and their growth might be 90 years outdated—I wouldn’t know, seeing as I’m no meteorologist, and I’m certainly no crystallographer. Still, the front 23 pages of this book were interesting to read, specifically regarding the author’s explanation of how snow crystals form and why they almost always form into perfectly symmetrical hexagons.

The next 202 pages are as mesmerizing as any kaleidoscope, as artistic as any collection of Mondrian (albeit in monotone), and as symmetrically unique as any of your kids’ paper-cut snowflakes at Christmastime. This has been my family’s coffee-table book for the past six months, and I simply can’t get rid of it. It’s inspiring and fascinating. It’s black-and-white and old, but I simply can’t give it up.

Have I tooted its horn enough?

The dumb thing probably hasn’t been in print for decades, so I’m just spinning my wheels here, but if you come across it and have a single artistic bone in your body, I encourage you to pick it up. You won’t be disappointed, either by the years of labor that went into its initial publication or by the end product which is the most addicting, page-flipping book in our house right now. I recommend it highly…if you can find it.

©2020 E.T.