Nature Is Metal book arrives Oct. 13 with 75 subjects

Nature Is Metal: It's a Life-Eats-Life World comes out Oct. 13 from Workman, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Popular Science ran an excerpt, a gallery of images that expands to full screen when a reader clicks a photograph.

The book covers 75 subjects, taken from plants, animals and natural phenomena. It pairs color photographs with writing about how those subjects are built, how they stay alive and how they hunt.

The authors are Ettore R. Paolucci and Hans Aschim. Paolucci started Nature Is Metal, the account the book takes its name from. Popular Science reports 7.5 million subscribers to the Instagram feed and 1.23 million on YouTube, which makes the photo account roughly six times the size of the video one. Popular Science calls him self-taught, a storyteller with a good eye for what travels online.

Aschim is a writer and creative director in Vancouver, British Columbia. Popular Science notes that he runs trails in the Coast Mountains, bear spray included. For a book devoted to how wild things hunt and survive, that is a sensible piece of field research.

Where to start

The excerpt is a gallery rather than an argument, so a few minutes of clicking tells you whether the book's framing works for you. It is out Oct. 13.

If you keep binoculars by the door for the night sky, they work in daylight too. A shelf of sky guides and a shelf of nature books end up serving the same purpose: you notice more once you know what you are looking at.

Our take: 7.5 million subscribers is a lot of people agreeing that nature is not decoration. Seventy-five subjects, photographed and explained, is a fair way to put that on paper.

• books
• Ettore R. Paolucci
• Hans Aschim
• Nature Is Metal
• wildlife
• Workman