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Glickman, Michael "Crop Circles". Wooden Books, Glastonbury, revised edition 2005. 154mm x 125mm. 64pp. diags. ISBN 1-904263-34-8. £4.99

Since the first edition of this book, back in 1996, the topic of crop circles has taken more of a back seat in the world of the "paranormal", whilst, at the same time, the complexity of the formations themselves have continued to evolve. The debate over "who dunnit?" seems to have been resolved in favour of humans, unless you are one of the "true believers" who insist that despite the "hoaxes" there are still genuine formations done by "aliens". In this small but perfectly formed booklet, Glickman wisely eschews spending much time debating the question, limiting himself to the occasional aside on the subject.

Instead this booklet is primarily concerned with documenting the variety of formations that have been produced over the years. Now, those who have accessed the various crop circle websites, or maybe bought the splendid calendars and so forth, will be well aware of how amazing some of the formations look from the air, especially in colour photographs. Sadly the limitations of the booklet's format, tasteful pale brown paper with darker brown text and diagrams, whilst aesthetically very easy on the eye, mean that it is impossible to reproduce such representations of the formations. Instead Glickman gives us a selection of basic forms that the formations appear in, such as whirlpools, circles, fractals, dolphins, triangles, squares and more complex formations, each illustrated by five or so examples in diagrammatic form each with a page of text. The book also has an appendix concerning crop formation geometry, in which geometrical shapes are superimposed on diagrams of the original formations to show the relationships between elements of each formation. Again the format renders many of the diagrams difficult to understand, and for that the traditional larger black ink diagrams on white paper is the only answer. Anyone with less than perfect eyesight may find some of the text in this section difficult to read and the diagrams may be indistinct. Another problem arises from the question of scale. None of the diagrams appear to be done to any consistent scale - neither is it shown next to the diagrams and occasionally mentioned in the text. Finally these abstractions are not shown in relationship to the surrounding countryside.

Now, I'm not suggesting this a bad book, rather that the format is ill-suited to the subject matter. It may make for a neat commodity and presumably sits well with other books by the same publisher. Further, the lack of colour helps bring the price down to a more user friendly £4.99, suggesting that this is mainly aimed at the tourist market or maybe the gift trade. Glickman's text is clear throughout and avoids being contentious - not easy on this topic - and the main diagrams are reasonable abstractions of the original designs. Sadly they simply don't convey the awesome scale of many of the original formations, or their beauty.

One for the tourist - geographical or intellectual.

5/10

Richard Alexander