Member-only story
This Week’s Word Is “Cross-Sections.”
I’m bending the Word Wednesday rules slightly this week. Do hyphenated words like cross-sections count as one word or two? Whatever the case, it wouldn’t be allowed in Scrabble. This week’s review is for a reissue of the book that put publisher DK on my radar.
I was 21 at the time, but I loved Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections. I had a much younger (now) brother-in-law, so I could justify owning a copy. Twenty-five years on, the book has a new edition and it’s just as glorious as it ever was.
What is Incredible Cross-Sections?
It’s a 48-page hardback filled with detailed and fully annotated diagrams of interesting buildings and vehicles. This new edition hasn’t had much of an overhaul, as far as I can tell. It’s a slightly smaller format, that’s all. There are no new diagrams, which is a shame. It would have been great to see a modern edifice such as the Burj Khalifa, perhaps a modern high-speed train, or, instead of a Jumbo Jet, an Airbus A380 represented.
DK has led the way in diversifying the scope of these types of book and the western focus of this one makes it easy to tell it was created 25 years ago. (Not least, because the plane represented is a…
