On August 24th, in the year 79 AD, Mount Vesuvious erupted and buried the town of Pompeii. I thought I would look at a few volcano books, and find out more.
The first book (in my kids section) is “Why do Volcanoes Erupt?” by Dr. Philip Whitfield, 1990. This is an interesting book with questions answered about the planet. It explains how volcanoes happen, and why. The only actual volcanic eruption they discuss is the Krakatoa eruption on August 27, 1883. It was supposedly the most powerful eruption in history.
I then went to my pop-up book collection and found the book “The Earth Pack: Tornadoes, Earthquakes, volcanoes, Nature’s Forces in Three Dimensions” by Ron van der Meer and Ron Fisher, published 1995.
It had a great section about volcanoes, even a pop-up that had a billowing cloud of ash that moved skyward when the book was opened. An interesting fact was that when you turned the book backward, there was a diagram of the volcano, and several pargraphs describing it that were printed upside down, so when you were looking at the backside, you could read the paragraphs. An interesting detail.
This book did tell a little about the Vesuvius eruption, saying that the first explosion covered the city with two meters of ash and lapilli-glassy bits of lava. Eventually Pompeii and the nearby city of Herculaneum were buried under 20 meters of volcanic debris.
I then turned to an old volcano book “In the Shadow of Death: Martinique and the World’s Great Disasters” by Trumbull White, published 1902. Let me first give you a picture of the cover page. It is quite a title.
While the book does go into some Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius details in a chapter on its own, the main story is about the eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean on May 8th 1902. The book states that 50,000 people died that day, when the entire town of St Pierre was destroyed. St. Pierre was the capital of the island.
The book goes into great detail about that event, along with stories of the several survivors (one person in the deepest dungeon prison cell, and a nurse and young child in a boat in the harbor). Others that came in to help rescue, took many pictures that are in the book. It describes what happened in the neighboring towns, as well. Countries, especially the USA, helped in rebuilding and supporting survivors from the island.
There are then chapters of history for many of the islands in Caribbean; A study of vocanoes; And a history of major volcano eruptions in history. It is quite a book, and was printed right after the eruption happened.
There are two copies of this book, because, as you may already know, the one on the left is a Salesman’s Dummy copy. The one on the right is the actual book. The Salesman’s copy may have about 50 pages of the book, the book itself is almost 450 pages. A book salesman would go door to door, trying to sell this book. There are many vivid pictures of the aftermath from the volcano, and I can imagine the salesman expressing that this book is a “must own” piece of history.
I have a lava-ly collection of these type of books. Perhaps I have a seismic sense of good book collecting. And ash you can see, volcanoes are a blast. Guaranteed a good story, or your magma back.
Thanks for reading.
Librarytomes 