brilliant, beautiful, and teeming with animals

Creaturepedia: Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth, written and illustrated by Adrienne Barman
first published in Switzerland; published in the U.S. in 2013 by Wide Eyed Editions

I have fallen in love with Wide Eyed Editions.

So I recently ordered everything of theirs that my library holds, and ooh la la! I feel like a kid in a candy store. Everything is so magnificently beautiful, every detail deliciously packaged.

Creaturepedia is one of their titles, and it’s a visual stunner that I am wildly recommending for ages 2 through 100. 

Adrienne Barman has produced a glorious catalog of creatures — over 200 pages of showstopping design, brilliant color, and ingenuously-presented, teensy bites of information.

“Creaturepedia celebrates the amazing array of animals that grace our planet,” she says.  You can feel her sense of delight in her subject immediately as you scan her unusual, mind-tickling categories in the Table of Contents. We are not talking mammals, amphibians, and crustaceans, here. No, we get to meander through  “The Architects,” “The Lilliputians,” “The Pretty-in-Pinks,” “The Champion Breath-Holders” — 42 sparkling sets.

Turn the pages and drink in the beauty, the wildness, the oddities, the fantasticalness inhabiting our planet. There are animals to giggle about and animals to sigh over and to mourn the absence of. So much to talk about and find out about. Such an enticement towards both appreciation and curiosity. 

It’s a beauty, pure and simple. Check it out for a wide, wide age range. You won’t be sorry.