Animal Books

From reef guides on a dive boat to board books in the nursery:

animal books serve readers who almost never overlap. Reef identification guides are photo-heavy paperbacks that divers keep in a dry bag on the boat. Children’s animal books start with chunky board books and lift-the-flap titles and grow into the encyclopedias from DK or National Geographic Kids that a primary-school child reads cover to cover. Pet handbooks cover a new puppy or a first aquarium, and A Magic Web, Christian Ziegler’s photographs of the Barro Colorado forest, is natural history for the coffee table. Bird field guides for the trail sit under outdoor books, animals to colour in under coloring books, and books on raising the child rather than the puppy under parenting books.

A reef fish guide for the right ocean:

this is where most buyers go wrong. Each coast has largely different fish and needs its own book. On the Caribbean side, around Isla Grande, the standard is Paul Humann and Ned DeLoach’s Reef Fish Identification for Florida, the Caribbean and the Bahamas. For the Pacific, the same authors’ Baja to Panama volume does the job, as does Fishes of the Tropical Eastern Pacific by Gerald Allen and Ross Robertson, a fish scientist at the Smithsonian’s research institute in Panama. The trap is a title in the same series called Tropical Pacific: it covers Thailand to Tahiti, and most of its fish never reach Coiba or the Gulf of Chiriquí. For children, choose by what the child does with a book: thick card survives a teething baby, paper flaps suit one who can lift them without tearing.

What a lift-the-flap book is worth with a flap gone:

far less than the cover suggests. A hardback lift-the-flap or board book for toddlers costs around $15 to $20 new in Panama. A used copy with every flap attached and no chewed corners does the same job and is fair at most of that. Once two or three flaps have been torn off, the game it was bought for is gone, and it sells for a few dollars, usually as part of a box. Reef guides hold up much better: a copy that stayed dry is as useful as a new one.

Spray-rippled reef guides and chewed board books:

each wears in its own way. A reef guide that lived on a dive boat has spray-rippled pages, which are cosmetic, and sometimes a block of photo pages coming away from the binding, which is not. Board books get chewed, so look at the corners and at the hinge where the cover meets the spine. Open every flap, check whether an activity book’s stickers are gone, and try a sound book with fresh batteries: dead speakers are common. On an older pet or aquarium handbook, look at the copyright page: aquarium kit and training methods have moved on since older editions.

A box of outgrown toddler books, or a reef guide off the boat:

sets of children’s books move faster than single copies. Group them by age, photograph them spread on a table with a flap open, and say which flaps are torn. For a reef guide, put the region from the cover in the listing title, Caribbean, Baja to Panama or Indo-Pacific, because that one word decides whether a diver writes to you. Most boxes of toddler books come from families whose youngest now reads short novels, and the parent collecting one will sit down and lift every flap before paying, so count the torn ones first and put the number in the listing.