BOOKS
CONVERSĀTIŌ: IN THE COMPANY OF BEES
by Anne Noble with Zara Stanhope and Anna Brown Massey University Press — $60
The extreme pleasure to be had from this collaborative artwork begins the moment the reader holds it in their hands. The soft cloth cover of midnight blue with gold lettering has immediate tactile and visual appeal.
Anyone who removes that dustjacket to see what lies beneath will be well rewarded. The spine is not bound but has been left with the stitching exposed. On the front is a close-up photo of a bee’s head; on the back, the rear view. That’s a lot going on before you even get to page one. All this is, if you like, a metaphor for the complexity of bees and their lives and the way in which so much of it is hidden.
Even the contents page seizes the gaze, with chapter titles presented not in top-to-bottom, left-to-right reading order but zapping back and forth across the spread, like the flight of a bee.
Now you can commence to examine the actual contents of the book. records and pays tribute to a remarkable body of art by Anne Noble, best known as a photographer but
