Pilgrims of the air

You get a real sense of the thought and love that has gone into producing this beautiful little book. The choice of the paper and the font, together with the neatness of the binding all add up to deliver something that feels and looks wonderful. Does the text match the physicality of the book? It does indeed.

Pilgrims of the Air describes the abundance and subsequent extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, a bird once so numerous that its flocks literally filled the sky.  John Wilson Foster writes well and brings together evidence from a wide range of sources. There are moments where the wealth of evidence becomes too much, slowing the narrative flow, but these are few when set against the wider rhythm that Foster manages to maintain. I suspect the reason that this book has not been picked up more widely is because it comes from a small publisher, but it does set a high bar for the larger publishers to aspire to.

Book reviewed by Mike Toms