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The book presents 60 “species" from the imagination of author and illustrator, A.W. Bainbridge, taken from a fictional manuscript by the Reverend Jackson Whitehead, who served aboard the HMS Pica—sister ship to the Beagle—during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage in the 1830s. The menagerie of beasts, fish, fowl, and invertebrates, all created from traditional typefaces, numerals, and punctuation marks, ranges from the Bracket Spider or "Hanging Parentheses," which traps its prey by encasing them in its finely bracketed web, to the Comma Cat, identifiable by its very short pause.
