The first official publication of The Cloud Appreciation Society, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, is a humorous and instructive tour of the sky. The book introduces each of the different characters in the cloud family in turn. It tells of clouds being used to predict earthquakes and of one in Australia that glider pilots surf like a wave. It also settles such pressing questions as which variety of mackerel is it that lends its name to the ‘mackerel skies’ of the cirrocumulus stratiformis undulatus? And, more hypothetically, who would win in a fight between a cumulonimbus and a nimbostratus?

This is not a picture book, and is largely black and white, but it contains numerous diagrams and illustrations, a colour section in the middle, and over fifty cloud photographs, kindly contributed by the fantastic cloud photographers swelling the ranks of The Cloud Appreciation Society. The book first came out in 2006 and is now available in fifteen translations, some of which are shown above.