Giant Silkmoths not only delivers sensational images of these dramatic and devastating insects, it also supplies a new way of looking at them.
Simon Barnes, The Times, Saturday 3 December 2011

The perfect present for nature lovers, as well as anyone interested in butterflies and moths, whether for their incredible adaptions or for the beauty of the photography. Buy online and for Christmas from the Papadakis online shop

For anyone who missed Simon Barnes’s eye-opening article in The Times, you can read it below:

Moths and the art of mimicry
Simon Barnes
A gorgeous picture book offers sensational images of some dramatic and devastating creatures of the night

How can I know if you’re seeing the same thing that I am? I can’t. I can only make assumptions. You might be colour-blind. You might suffer from astigmatism and find in El Greco a plodding literal truth rather than a devastating reinterpretation of reality. You might have synaesthetic gifts and have a visual impression of sound.
So how can you or I or any mere human know how a bird sees the world?

A bird’s brain is wired differently. Most birds have their eyes set on either side of their head, which is great for all-round vision and looking out for enemies but doesn’t deliver the intense sense of three-dimensional space that those of us with two-eyed vision possess.

Which brings us to moths, and to what must surely be the loveliest picture-book of the year, on wildlife or any other subject. Philip Howse’s book Giant Silkmoths not only delivers sensational images of these dramatic and devastating insects, it also supplies a new way of looking at them.

A new way of looking at the world, a new way of seeing. It’s M.C. Escher, it’s Salvador Dalí, it’s every handbook on psychedelia that cluttered the shelves in the 60s. This is moths and the politics of ecstasy. And it’s all about how these enormous insects manage to avoid getting eaten by birds. They do so by distorting reality.

The great snag of being a giant moth is that it takes so long to get out of bed of an evening. That means you can’t get away quickly if you become aware of an insect-eating bird. These cold-blooded animals must raise their temperature to 30 degrees before they can get airborne. The process of activating the flight muscles can take eight minutes. It is called shivering, and at that point the moth is tremendously vulnerable.

The trick, then, is to hide while in full view. It’s movement that most often attracts the eye: these moths must hide while moving. They must be invisible while standing on the touchline doing their warm-up. And that’s where these acid visions come into their own.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to understand these tricks when looking at specimens pinned out on a board. This is a great way of telling one species from another, but it doesn’t tell you how moths live. Moths look different when they are alive, even to humans. They look radically different from birds.

Howse has looked at these moths with his own birdy eye and seen things the birdy way. He has found that the eye spots of many species look quite different when the animal is head down and moving: the enemy bird gets a sudden vivid impression of an owl or a snake and backs off at once.

There are other tricks still harder to get your head round. Some moths take on the appearance of a distant deer or a bear. This doesn’t sound even remotely convincing to us binocular-visioned humans, but a bird, seeing with only one eye, is unable to make clear judgments about distance and is taken in by the illusion.

By now Howse is getting into his stride and showing us a moth that looks like the foot of a giant cat, complete with claws, another that looks like a small mammal with ears and whiskers. Birds are more sensitive to colours at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum: some moths, enhanced by colour photography, carry the silhouette of a predatory bird, a brilliantly witty illusion. This is a book to boggle at, and it tells us that the natural world has more things to boggle at than we are capable of imagining.

Giant Silkmoths: Colour, Mimicry and Camouflage by Philip Howse and Kirby Wolfe (Papadakis, RRP £25).

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A control room, connected with the original experiments, will be brought from CERN in Geneva to Frankfurt – the most fascinating experiment of our time will happen right in front of the visitors of the Frankfurt Book Fair. In hall 4.2, booth B / 420, visitors will have a chance to witness how CERN is collecting data for the next revelation about our universe.

During the fair, physicists from CERN will give daily talks about their work with the Large Hadron Collider and the exhibition “Weltmaschine” (“World Machine”) will offer exciting insights into the groundbreaking work at CERN.

Voyage to the Heart of Matter, Papadakis’s critically acclaimed pop up book of the Atlas experiment at CERN, will be exhibited in hall 4.2 and at our stand, hall 8.0 / J / 912. In this unique collaboration between CERN and paper engineer Anton Radevsky, 7000 tonnes of metal, glass, plastic, cables and computer chips leap from the page in minature pop up, to tell the story of CERN’s quest to understand the birth of the universe. Visit us and the Large Hadron Collider and discover more!

If you would like to know more about the exhibition and events around the LHC at Frankfurt Book Fair, please visit the official website of the fair. To buy your own fascinating copy of The Voyage to the Heart of Matter, please visit the Papadakis online shop.

If you are interested in the rights to any of our titles, we would love to hear from you and meet you at the fair. Please contact us.

If you’re looking for the official Frankfurt Book Fair website, go here: http://www.buchmesse.de/en/fbf/

Philip Howse’s talk will be an exclusive preview of Giant Silkmoths – Colour, Mimicry & Camouflage, that will be published in November 2011. This publication by the prizewinning author explores the fascinating world of the giant silkmoths and their surprising strategies to protect themselves. Lavishly illustrated with magnificent photographs by Kirby Wolfe, an expert on silkmoths, this volume presents the grandeur and the fascinating natural history of these beautiful and exquisite insects.

Philip Howse has published books and research articles on insect behaviour and ecology. He has developed environmentally-friendly methods for the control of insect pests, recognised by a number of awards including the OBE. After a career spent mainly at Southampton University, he has now retired but continues writing about the insects that have fascinated him since childhood. His book Butterflies – Messages from Psyche won a bronze medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2011 in the category “Environment/Ecology/Nature”.

The “Autumn 2011 Book ‘n Author Week” will take place from Thursday 13th until Friday 21rst of October 2011 at the Eype Centre for the Arts. If you would like to know more about the festival’s schedule and ticket prices, please access the official website of the Eype Centre for the Arts.

If you would like to pre-order Giant Silkmoths – Colour, Mimicry & Camouflage, please visit the Papadakis online shop.

In the article ‘What happened to Oxford?” by Reg Little John Melvin describes how the idea for the book was born when he visited the Holywell Music Room in Oxford with Alexandra Papadakis:

To read this article on the website of the Oxford Times, please go to: www.oxfordtimes.co.uk. If you would like to buy your own fascinating copy of The Stones of Oxford – Conjectures on a Cockleshell, please visit the Papadakis online shop.

The IPPY awards were launched in 1996 and to this day over 2,500 IPPYs have been awarded to authors and publishers. The IPPYs recognize 12 Outstanding Books each year and award gold, silver and bronze medals in 69 categories to honour each year’s best independently published titles. The jury recognizes and rewards publications that show courage, innovation and creativity to induce change in the world of publishing.

Alexandra Papadakis presents the winning books

The ceremony of the IPPY awards took place on the eve of BookExpo America, the largest book fair in North America that offers the biggest selection of English language titles in the world. It was held from 24 to 26 May 2011 at the Javits Center in New York.

To order your own award-winning copies of Wild Africa and Butterflies: Messages from Psyche, please visit the Papadakis online shop. If you would like to know more about the IPPYs or BookExpo America, you can enter their official websites by clicking on the links.