A beautifully illustrated short book (collection of short essays) about the idea of pebbles as art (and more prosaically ornaments), with reference to Picasso, Hepworth, Moore, Kettles Yard in Cambridge and Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden.
This is supplemented with a very short chapter on different types of pebbles (no photographs, so not very useful, and Stocks refers to the recently republished The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter's Guide) and a brief chapter on a few good beaches in the UK to collect pebbles.
It only provides a couple of hours reading, but I enjoyed this slight book as it is a satisfying combination of illustrations and short essays. ( )

48/2021. The Book of Pebbles by Christopher Stocks (author) and Angie Lewin (illustrator), which is a non-fiction book on the natural history and art of pebbles. Stocks' text washes around Lewin's art like waves on the shore. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote about Barbara Hepworth comparing her paramour Ben Nicholson's head to "the most lovely pebble ever seen". At under 100 pages, if we discount the filler at the back, this book is small but perfectly formed, like a pebble.

Quotes

"Sometimes at night I lie in bed and listen to pebbles being made. The sound is uncanny, yet oddly comforting, like the slow deep breath of a slumbering giant - or more prosaically, as they used to say on the Isle of Portland, like everyone in Weymouth swishing their curtains open and closed at the same time;"

Lmao: (...) "the nineteenth century was dismissed as a purgatory of smoke and stovepipe hats, blacking factories and bewhiskered patriarchs in funereal suits," (...)

Lol, have y'all seen that "prof or hobo" meme? Well: "Enthusiastically bearded, with his clothes in an apparently chronic state of mild disarray, Tandy embodies the Platonic ideal of a geologist," (...) ( )