The Bookworm: 'Subterranea'

Subterranea: Journey into the Depths of the Earth’s Most Extraordinary Underground Spaces, by Chris Fitch. 225 pages. Timber Press. 2020.

Initially, unlike Pompeii, very few human remains were found, suggesting that most residents had made a successful escape across the sea. But eventually the discovery of the petrified skeletons of over 120 people showed this not to be true. The brain of one Herculaneum man, believed to have been a caretaker, was found to have been so incinerated by the heat that it transformed into glass, a rare instance of brain tissue being vitrified and preserved for archaeologists. (p. 81)

Four down, one to go.

Next up in my queue of readable Christmas gifts from The Librarian was a fascinating book about underground spaces: Subterranea: Journey into the Depths of the Earth’s Most Extraordinary Underground Spaces.

I received Subterranea in 2021. (The Librarian gets hardcover books. Whenever I read a hardcover book, I think of something I read long ago: authors make more money on hardcover books; they don’t make much on paperbacks. I don’t recall when and where I read that, but it is something that has stuck with me. Sadly, I like paperbacks, but luckily there are people like The Librarian in the world.) I was unenthusiastic about the book at first and thought it was all about cenotes. However, I was thankfully proven wrong when I opened it a month or so ago.

From caves to giant storm drains, buried cities to fiery pits, depositories for seeds and ice to villages and tunnel complexes, Subterranea is what the subtitle promises. Written by Chris Fitch and including illustrations and maps by Matthew Young, Subterranea digs deep, literally and figuratively, to profile captivating and amazing places beneath our feet, most of which I did not know about until now. Among those I found most interesting are Camp Century, the Great Man-Made River, the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, Herculaneum, the Basilica Cistern, G-Cans, and Helsinki Underground City.

Fitch’s British-English can be British-English: clunky. (I received Atlas of the Invisible the same year, so it was apparently the Christmas of British-English.) I don’t know what it is about B-E, but it does not flow well to my American-English ears. (Perhaps I have posted about this before, but I wonder if it is a difference in how it is taught. That is an entirely different rabbit hole—which is also a subterranean space.) On top of the limpness of B-E, the copy is sprinkled with typos and there is an egregious jump in the feature about paleoburrows where part of the text is missing.

The maps and pics are beautiful, but they are just teases and too few. Some of the places featured in the book have better pics on their Wikipedia page.

On that note, Subterranea is a good starting point for looking deeper into the spaces featured. It can be the entrance to a complex and fascinating underground space itself.