Hardcover, 144 pages, $24.95
You may already have a collection of sea glass, including precious pieces of lavender, turquoise and cobalt blue.
Or how about beach stones in egg or heart shapes? Or maybe glass shards bearing some partial words. What about intact sea urchins and sand dollars?
Your home may be a museum to display and honor these relics. Yet no matter how much you collect, beachcombing is never done. Every time you walk on a beach, there is always more to be scavenged and savored.
For those of you addicted to beachcombing, Josie Iselin’s new book, Beach: A Book of Treasure, offers sublime photos of the objects she has culled from beaches. Iselin is a summer resident of Vinalhaven.
Two summers ago, I asked Josie if I could watch her at work. We began with a foraging foray to Lane’s Island on Vinalhaven during low tide. I watched her eyes sweep and dart, taking in the large landscape and then all its details. Sharing that excursion with her, I pondered the resonance experienced when we beachcomb. How can there be so many periwinkles or mussel shells or stones in one place as to be indiscriminate, and yet individual ones stand out for us, catch our eye, and beckon us with a seductive “Come and get me,” murmured so only we hear it?
When we left, Josie had a few select shells, a cluster of Rosa rugosa blooms, a clump of seaweed and a spray of beach peas. Then we headed back to her family home on the island for the next step. In a cramped bedroom, a large flatbed scanner was set up amid a kind of lost and found collection of that season’s jaunts. She put the treasures we’d returned with on the glass plate of the scanner, worked with a program on her laptop for settings and began to experiment with the images she could create.
I began to realize how important composition was, the artistic choices she made about what colors, textures, types of objects and sizes could come together in a picture, and how that would then tell a story.
Josie has created other beautiful picture books on shells, beach stones, heart stones, and leaves and pods.
For this book, Josie wrote the text, offering scientific information as well as personal anecdotes. I learned about the chemical composition of coral, and why the crystalline structure of its calcium carbonate makes it susceptible to dissolving. This is one reason that coral reefs are at risk of extinction due to global climate change.
Sometimes a picture invited me to linger and get to know something better, such as seaweed. I learned its anatomy (blade, bladder, stipe, and holdfast) while marveling at its beauty. Every page illuminates-both intellectually and aesthetically-what we find on a beach.
It’s hard to say what my favorite pictures are. Many remind me of Vinalhaven, although beaches from around the world are represented. One image has personal significance; on page 116, there is a line of painted wooden sticks, bereft of their lobster buoys. Those are part of a collection of mine I showed Josie after she expressed interest. Obviously it was impossible for me to disguise my own passion for scavenging! And, as someone who collects manmade objects as well as natural, it was not a leap for me to appreciate what else Josie has included in her book. She includes a picture of a rusted-out spark plug and advises, “trash can be treasure.” She writes that things like the rubber gloves used in lobstering or pieces of boat gear fascinate her.
This book is a wonderful way to keep beach memories alive over the winter, making it a great off-season survival kit. It is a superb present, and may even be the therapeutic means of sublimating that obsessive collecting urge you’ve been struggling with. And for anyone, especially children curious to learn, here’s a painless education. Welcome to a place where recycling nature is revivifying and pieces of trash redeem themselves in a new iteration. In this time of more conscientious consumerism, Beach: A Book of Treasure suggests an affordable extravagance, right here under our feet.