SHARK: THE KILLER OF THE DEEP by Zane Grey, edited by Loren Grey

How '70s is this spread? Cigarette ads and dead fish!

Or, Shark! Zane Grey's Tales of Man-Eating Sharks as the inside cover tells us.This is a collection of old fish tales from one of America's preeminent writers, sportsman/he-man/author Zane Grey (1872-1939) as edited by his son Loren (1915-2007) who accompanied his old man on many a voyage. There's a paucity of man-eaters here despite the hype, and despite Zane's invocation of some 300+ deadly shark attack files in his possession the focus is more on how sharks factor into sport fishing. The stories range from 1925-1937 and conjure a golden age of sport fishing, raw adventure on the cusp of becoming mere hobby just as the wild ocean is transitioning from myth to ecology, mysterious monsters to type specimens. Here is the ocean as a bottomless resource, a playground and proving ground for any manjack willing to test his mettle. It's all manly men, of course, including Loren's older brother Romer who also furnishes the few photos in this book, all grainy black and white. 

Like father, like son

Loren namedrops Jaws as well as the groundbreaking 1971 documentary Blue Water White Death, reflecting the contradictory relationship we had with sharks in the '70s as mythic sailors' yarns mingled uneasily with emerging science and observation. In his vintage writings Zane himself admits a compulsive hatred of sharks, the desire to obliterate any shark he sees ... but also reflects that the beauty and power of these animals can be transcendent. The destructive urge seems like it was a common one in that bygone era, where sharks were seen mostly as pests and competition for sport fishing trophies - more than a few times Zane describes the futile task of reeling up a beauty of a fish only to have it devoured by sharks just a few feet from the surface. Zane claims that scientists deny any danger at all from sharks in his time, which seems dubious. Loren brings up another '70s shark book, Shark Attack by David Baldridge, to bolster his late father's opinion of sharks as dangerous man-eaters. Baldridge's book is dynamite, by the way, the first popular science volume on sharks to focus on scientific data over sea stories, and is much more measured towards sharks than implied in its use here by Loren.

Loren includes an epilogue pleading to stop the slaughter of sharks and the despoiling of our Mother Earth, noting that even his father was conscious of the place sharks have in nature.

Belmont Tower Books, 1976