Spiders by Nic Bishop

A review by Bill Landau

Bishop, Nic. Spiders. New York: Scholastic, 2007.

Children who were enthralled with the itsy-bitsy spider nursery rhyme will happily graduate into this glorious photo essay of spiders that is both mesmerizing and gruesome. While Bishop’s books on frogs, butterflies and lizards are above average, this effort earned him the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Honor in 2008 for excellence in informational books for children.

The highly detailed, razor-sharp photos of arachnids are the main attraction of this book. They provide the reader with views impossible to perceive with the naked eye, detailing multiple eyes, microscopic hair and even the spinnerets, which make silk. Whether the reader has photography talents or not, it is easy to appreciate the immense amount of patience and skill that went into the capture of these images.

For those interested in how he accomplishes these amazing photos, Bishop provides the readers with an afterward explaining his photography technique and fondness for spiders. While the author does not provide any source notes, the reader can clearly see the author is absolutely enthralled with spiders and he wants nothing more than to share his enthusiasm with his readers. We even learn Bishop raised many of the book’s featured spiders in his home.

What makes this a complete package is the author’s captivating writing style. Bishop chooses words that make it personal for the young reader. The very first page plants the seed in impressionable minds that there are spiders everywhere, “even in your basement.” Imaginations are stirred on page eight when Bishop reveals some spiders are as “big as a page in this book.”

Helping the text along is an excellent page design. No page features more than one photo and the images often run full bleed with text displayed over a bright complimentary background. Each page presents one particularly intriguing sentence set in a larger font, in a contrasting color. This technique allows the reader to admire the photo, then scan the highlighted sentence to see if their interest is piqued enough to read the full text.

From a sociological perspective, one could ponder the question of how much close-up detail is too much close-up detail. Might the author lose arachnophobic readers who find the spiders photos too extreme? Bishop was careful not to get too graphic in the depiction of the “circle of life”, avoiding shots such as mass egg-laying or scenes of dismembered prey. Judging from the fact that the well-loved library copy reviewed here had over 100 checkouts, Bishop’s work is just what the readers were looking for.

Bishop has no peer in the subgenre of spider books. The images in this volume make other studies of spiders appear lackluster. While Bishop’s Spiders shouldn’t be mistaken as a field guide to identifying various spider species, it is obvious this was intended to be more of a spider “shock and awe” book. If upper-elementary age boys ever start collecting coffee tables, rest assured this book will be prominently displayed on top.