Conville & Walsh

The first publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society

This guide is for anyone who’s sat back, stared up at the clouds, and wondered how they form, whether they mean it is going to rain and why that one over there looks like an elephant. It explains clouds – showing how and why they form by covering each of the ten types of common clouds – but it also explores our contradictory feelings towards them. We talk of someone having ‘a cloud hanging over them’, and yet our poetry, literature and art abound with celebrations of cloudy skies. Is it not the clouds, after all, that give the sunset its beauty?

With black-and-white illustrations running concurrent with the text, THE CLOUDSPOTTER’S GUIDE re-awakens the sense of wonder we felt as children when we looked up at these most transient and beautiful of nature’s displays. It teaches us to distinguish the different types (whose names such as cirrus and nimbostratus are poetry in themselves). It reveals that there is a rare type of cloud that forms in Queensland which gliders ‘ride’ like surfers on a wave. It explains how the US military chemically manipulated the clouds during the Vietnam War to make it rain on the Viet Cong. It shows that someone who is blessed and lucky in Iran is described as having ‘a sky always filled with clouds’.

The Cloud Appreciation Society, from which the guide originates, is for people who believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. Who but Club 18–30 sun fascists would want to look up at monotonous blue skies every day? Clouds are nature’s poetry, and it is high time we learned to read them. They are the expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.

Clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul. They are the Rorschach images of the sky, onto which we project our imaginations. So look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty and live life with your head in the clouds.