SHARK! UNPREDICTABLE KILLER OF THE SEA by Thomas Helm

We're not out of the water yet! In fact, we've got a full blown feeding frenzy on our hands, as author Thomas Helm throws in some more bloody chum with SHARK! UNPREDICTABLE KILLER OF THE SEA!

This is pre-Jaws sharking, with Helm plunging the murky depths of myth and midcentury neurosis - he tells one story of being aboard a sport fishing boat that came upon some friendly porpoises. Some he-men with him took it upon themselves to spear a curious visitor! Ultimately only one man could finish the deed, and afterwards Helm says his boasting fell on deaf ears. Elsewhere he describes the "diabolical" method of drano poisoning sharks. We haven't even gotten to post-Jaws supercharged shark mania and we can see the era's blunt, singleminded hatred of the natural world, the need to kill, maim, destroy!

Our author, Thomas Helm (1919-1993)

Helm peppers his work with plenty of salty dog tales (like his own supposed sighting of a 30 foot monster great white in the Caribbean) and sport fishing, but works hard against the anti-shark, anti-nature attitude, some of it via an appeal to the shark's place in human commerce similar to Captain Hal Scharp in Shark Safari. Helm's species guide section benefits from his drawings, putting it ahead of Captain Scharp's similar rundown.

The photo spread in the middle of the book is a fun mix of gruesome shark pics, other sea friends like octopus and porpoises, and Captain Bill Gray of the Miami Seaquarium posing with dead fish and only sometimes with a shirt.

Helm describes other killers of the deep like sawfish, swordfish, octopus, Portuguese man-of-war, stonefish, sea urchins, moray eels, and the deadly orca! Helms calls the orca the most dangerous animal in the sea and relates a tale from Zane Grey of seeing a pod of orcas slaughter porpoises until the water turned red. The humble stingray (or stingaree), meanwhile, is Helm's admitted least favorite sea killer, while manta rays are (of course) completely harmless and so undeserving of a bad reputation. The fearsome barracuda, meanwhile, gets his own chapter to himself!

Helm ends his book with a record of shark attacks in the USA, a form to report new attacks to the Smithsonian, and a brief bibliography:

Helm's acknowledgments and bibliography credit George A. Llano, who would later pen his own paperback shark attack!

Hardcover edition

Sea serpent/monster text by Helm from 1962

Shark! is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Collier Books, 1971 (original pub. 1961)

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