Customer Reviews

Snow Crystals (Dover Pictorial Archive)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

W.A. Bentley spent fifty years painstakingly recording snowflakes, frost, rime, sleet and ice in all its forms. Even before "Snow Crystals" was published in 1931, his work was well known, and so popular that eventually a donor provided the (apparently large) amount of money needed to assemble this beautiful collection.

There is a small amount of text at the front of the book, which is moderately interesting. It contains a description of how to take these pictures for yourself, if you'd like to; and a classification of the kinds of snowflake and other ice forms depicted here. The bulk of the book, however, is made up of well over two thousand black and white photographs, the vast majority of them of single snowflakes. You can get an idea of what they look like by clicking on Amazon's image of the cover picture, above; in the book, the images are white on black. You may also want to visit snowflakebentley.com, which contains more examples, and more information about Bentley himself (there is almost none in this book). In most or all cases, Bentley went to the trouble of making a duplicate negative of each snowflake and then cutting out, by hand, the finely detailed image, so that the background to the picture would be pure black.

The results are spectacular. The snowflakes are ethereally beautiful, and the variety is just stunning. However, in case it's not clear from what I've said so far, this is a contemplative book. It's not a book to read: it's a book to browse through, put away, and get out again another snowy day. Children will like it, but just to glance at, not to go through steadily.

Recommended.

In case you are trying to decide between "Snowflakes in Photographs" and "Snow Crystals", both by Bentley and published by Dover, this book is the better deal. Ironically, you get twice as many snowflake photos in "Snow Crystals" than in "Snowflakes in Photographs". Both beautiful books feature stunning black and white photographs of snowflakes but this book definitely has better 'text' support. I bought the two books at the same time thinking that this one focused more on Bentley and the other one focused more on the pictures, but it was a mistake. This is a case of "you get what you pay for" and the only reason to buy "Snowflakes in Photographs" over this one is that it is a bit cheaper. Buy "Snow Crystals", it is a blizzard of beauty with gorgeous photographs of snowflakes, nature's fragile crystalline miracles.

This book will amaze you. It has been in print for 65 years and the copy in our family comes out every holiday season and is greeted like an old friend. Writing and photo illustrations by W. A. Bentley. Reprint of the original 1931 edition. The first time I looked into this book and flipped through the pages, I was hooked. Over 2400 photographs of individual snow crystals! Categorized and compared in all their individuality. Gives meaning to "No two snowflakes are alike!" This is a gift for the gifted child in your life, written by a gifted child who spent his life in the single minded pursuit of recording the diversity and uniqueness of the amazingly ephemeral snowflake. I didn't know there was a hard cover edition. Go ahead and get it in hard cover. You are going to keep it a long time.

Bentley's work is a classic and shows that good science is persistence with attention to detail. Bentley's methods are reproducible by student scientists, professionals and the public.

The book helps challenge the stereotypical "snowflake" (a spatial dendrite) reproduced in K-12 classrooms and commercial store windows. The International Classification of Snow has 80 "basic" types of snow crystals. This book helps everyone make sense of all types. Snow is unique in that it is the most unstable substance on Earth - constantly changing while it is forming, falling and continuing to change once it reaches ground. Even those areas that never experience snow (falling during a storm or accumulated on the ground) actually receive much of their precipitation as snow - the crystals just happen to melt on the way down to the ground.

A 10-year boy once provided me with a simple explanation of what snow really is: "Dead clouds!" Bentley helps us see inside the clouds and inside snowflakes - a special, long-term gift.

This book has 226 pages, most of which consist of black and white photographs of snow and ice crystals. You might think that photographing snow crystals is no different than photographing other inanimate objects, but it's not true. Obtaining high-quality photographs of snow and ice crystals takes great work and perseverance, and you don't just find a library of such things lying about anywhere.

The book contains more than just photographs. Part one has some really interesting stuff on different techniques used throughout history for reproducing the images of snow and ice crystals, along with some very interesting descriptions about the preparation and effort that go into taking a high-quality photographic plates. This section also describes how the crystals are classified, and some meteorological background information about how these crystals form, and how their structure leads to other phenomena in nature, such as the rings you sometimes observe around a bright moon on a cold winter night.

Part 2 is only a few pages long (compared with part 1, which is 20) and discusses related phenomena such as the frost on windowpanes, dew and frost, rime ice, and glaze. Most of the book (pages 24 through 226) consists of reproductions of photographic plates showing snow crystals, with examples also of ice, window-pane frost, dew and frost, and glaze. A typical page shows 12 snow crystals, so there well over 2,000 examples in this book of just about every six-pointed crystal you can imagine.

Now for the really interesting part. You've heard that no two snowflakes are the same. Right? Well, read this book very carefully. On page 95 third row down, the first two crystals in the row are exactly alike (you have to look closely to match some small features because of differences in exposure - but they are there). Are they really two different snowflakes that look exactly alike? Or, was the image of one snowflake simply reproduced twice in the same book? Could it be that the authors have a sense of humor and could not help poking at the common assertion that "no two snowflakes are alike?" Who knows? But if the elegant geometry and art of nature inspires you with awe, then I'm sure you will find this book provides plenty of examples. Although Bentley and Humphreys did their work years ago, but their book is still a work of art.

This book is a collection of some of W. A. Bentley's finest snowflake photographs. At the beginning of the book is a 20-page introduction to the photography and science of snowflakes (as of 1930). The photographic advice is more of value today as historical documentation about how the pictures were taken- -we no longer use photographic plates or develop and fix our own negatives. The scientific section consists mostly of descriptive and classificatory commentary, with relatively little in the way of explanation as to why the snowflakes take on the shapes that they do. Some of the commentary cites specific plates as examples. The real value of the book is in the plates themselves- -two hundred pages of high-quality black and white photographs, depicting over two thousand differently shaped snowflakes. A reader could spend many hours poring over the magical snowflakes. In looking through the plates, it becomes clear quite quickly that Bentley was a man of genius and dedication.

This book has 226 pages, most of which consist of black and white photographs of snow and ice crystals. You might think that photographing snow crystals is no different than photographing other inanimate objects, but it's not true. Obtaining high-quality photographs of snow and ice crystals takes great work and perseverance, and you don't just find a library of such things lying about anywhere.

The book contains more than just photographs. Part one has some really interesting stuff on different techniques used throughout history for reproducing the images of snow and ice crystals, along with some very interesting descriptions about the preparation and effort that go into making high-quality photographic plates. This section also describes how the crystals are classified, and some meteorological background information about how these crystals form, and how their structure leads to other phenomena in nature, such as the rings you sometimes observe around a bright moon on a cold winter night.

Part 2 is only a few pages long (compared with part 1, which is 20) and discusses related phenomena such as the frost on windowpanes, dew and frost, rime ice, and glaze. Most of the book (pages 24 through 226) consists of reproductions of photographic plates showing snow crystals, with examples also of ice, window-pane frost, dew and frost, and glaze. A typical page shows 12 snow crystals, so there well over 2,000 examples in this book of just about every six-pointed crystal you can imagine.

Now for the really interesting part. You've heard that no two snowflakes are the same. Right? Well, read this book very carefully. I found two crystals in the book that are exactly alike (you have to look closely to match some small features because of differences in exposure - but they are there). Are they really two different snowflakes that look exactly alike? Or, was the image of one snowflake simply reproduced twice in the same book? Could it be that the authors have a sense of humor and could not help poking at the common assertion that "no two snowflakes are alike?" Who knows? But if the elegant geometry and art of nature inspires you with awe, then I'm sure you will find this book provides plenty of examples. Although Bentley and Humphreys did their work years ago, but their book is still a work of art.

I love this book because it gives me a unique feeling of spiritual unity each time I open it. It may be that you will appreciate it for different reasons, but for me, it is a graphic reminder that there is a creative and benign intelligence moving the Universe. Originally published in 1931 this unique book contains 202 black and white plates of snow flakes mounted and photographed with painstaking effort under difficult circumstances by W.A. Bentley aka Snowflake Bentley. Maybe you won't want to sit down and look at each and every one because, of course, they are nearly all the same even though each one is unique, but that's another reason I like the book. It demonstrates so simply and eloquently the unity in diversity.
The photographs are very beautiful and they will be interesting to anyone who is fascinated with weather or with graphics in art, perhaps for textile patterns or silk-screen ideas. The images are copyright free and you can use up to ten of them without fees, permission, or acknowledgement.
There is a very small amount of text at the beginning of this book that tells about the different kinds of snow crystals and a little bit about how the work to capture them on film was done. There is one nice photograph of Bentley at his camera which is charming, but for the most part, this book is dedicated to the snow crystals themselves. Anyone who has stood outside on a cold, crisp snowy day and caught snow crsytals on an upturned mitten and marveled at their exquisite beauty will enjoy this book. The crystals speak volumes and we have Mr. Bentley to thank for cummunicating their message to us.

Snow Crystals by Bentley represents the exhilarating beauty and complexity of snowflakes in photographs taken with painstaking effort and enterprise. The book has a very useful introduction, though most of it is devoted to the diverse patterns exhibited by snowflakes. The quest to understand why snowflakes have their delightful shape and symmetry has intrigued the scientists, poets and philosophers for centuries. For example, in sixteenth century, Kepler's essay (On six-cornered snowflake) presents a very illuminating (and perhaps first scientific) account of his thought process on the physics of why snowflake is formed. He discussed several key ideas relevant to packing problems, and on their shapes, and the book by Bentley surely dazzles in being able to present a diverse range of possibilities realized by nature. Highly recommended to science enthusiasts, artists, photographers and atmospheric physicists.

One mans decades long dedication to capturing the beauty of water crystals and a communities support of his collection has paid off. I am in awe of the intensity of vision to capture the nearly ephemeral nature of snow and ice crystals. A great book.