Questing Beast

A review of "MonsterQuest: Giant Squid Found", an episode of the extremely boring TV series "MonsterQuest".

Another episode of “MonsterQuest”. This time Doug Hajicek and his roundtable are trying to find a squid the size of a school bus. A veritable kraken! They believe they have succeeded. The sceptics have remained sceptical. Could be interesting for squid aficionados, marine buffs or Bigfooters tired of monsters on dry land, but personally, I'm not a very big fan of this slow-paced, somewhat boring series. Only two stars. And yes, I may be subjective.

It even smells old

This is probably the most bizarre book I've ever seen or handled. "The Cephalopoda of the Plankton Expedition" by Georg Johann Pfeffer is a 1993 English translation of a 1912 German monograph, based on the findings of the 1889 Plankton expedition.

I admit that I never heard of this particular expedition before, but apparently it was quite important for its day (and no, I'm not being flippant). Many prominent German zoologists studied the specimens from this research exploration of the world's oceans. Pfeffer himself was a kind of Over-authority on pretty much every branch of the animal kingdom, but he is mostly associated with work on mollusks.

Pfeffer's most famous monograph dealt with the oegopsid cephalopods caught by the Plankton expedition. In plain English, the man had a scientific crush on squids. For some reason, this mammoth work - previously only available in German - has been translated to English through grants made available by the National Science Foundation. I admit that I found the book fascinating. This is the kind of very old fashioned book that you could still find in Swedish libraries (including school libraries) about 30 years ago. The text is incredibly detailed, the few pictures are black-and-white photos, and the book exhumes a really strange smell. Weirdly, this modern edition from 1992 also smells "old", like a book from...well, 1912 perhaps? I even had to wash my hands after handling it. I'm either going insane, or...the book is deliberately printed on a special kind of paper to give it an old "feel".

Obviously, this isn't a book for the layman or general reader, and even squid enthusiasts would be hard-pressed to read it from cover to cover. The squids on the photo plates do look bizarre and somewhat scary even in black-and-white, but that's about it. "The Cephalopoda of the Plankton Expedition" is a reference work for those aspiring to become like Pfeffer. Incidentally, the book is called "volume 2", although no volume 1 seems to exist in English. Presumably, the original work was even larger! Like an Architheutis, perhaps?

Now, I have to go and wash my hands again. Squid ink?

Only for royalists?

A review of "Cephalopods from the Scientific Expeditions of Prince Albert I of Monaco" 

I admit that I only glanced through this obscure book very quickly. It's another Smithsonian institution special. The book is a translation of a part of a more extensive work, written by Albert I, the prince of Monaco. Apparently, the prince was a keen supporter of scientific endeavors and something of a scientist himself. This particular work deals with cephalopods (squids) caught during several scientific expeditions. It only contains a few plates, and the text seems to deal mostly with the caught specimens, rather than the species to which they belong. Sometimes, the poor squids were caught without a head or tentacles! This work is obviously of interest only to very specialized researchers, although a crazy royalist admirer of the autocratic prince Albert might perhaps also find it interesting as a collectors' item.