At first sight it is a large coffee-table book, designed with much colour.
Photographer David Sanderson supplied a huge number of illustrations to match Waru's magazine-style tales about such topics as a rare letter written by Captain Cook, exotic gifts to prime ministers, records of secret weapons, sightings of UFOs, the battle-worn flag of warrior prophet Te Kooti and grisly exhibits from murder trials.
These are only a fraction of the "cornucopia of unexpected objects, curious ephemera and the slightly bizarre" that the book proclaims. It was the result of fossicking into some of the almost 100km of records and objects held in the national archives.
The assortment of stories (filed in five general groups) are mostly of national significance, ranging from the Mt Erebus disaster, state secrets like the "Tsunami Bomb" and the Dr Sutch espionage case, to poignant letters written to David Lange from New Zealand children, a letter from Florence Nightingale to a New Zealand nurse, and the law passed to protect dolphin Pelorus Jack.
At a local level there is a reminder of the Garrett gang's bushranging attempts to steal the gold coming from the Otago diggings - and a flashback to the days of divorce cases held in Dunedin courts.
Among the oddities used to titivate readers are rejected designs for our decimal currency, diagrams on how to correctly erect a scaffold ready for a hangman, the axle used to weigh down the body of Harvey Crewe and the patent registration for hokey pokey.
It is a heavy book that most will love to riffle through and then dip into from time to time, rather than read from cover to cover. Its sheer volume and variety of content are indeed impressive.
Taken as a whole this is a human, if very unconventional, collage of New Zealand's history.
The ink has really been splashed! Some of the pages are blue and some black - as well as the traditional white paper. Most of the typography is striking, but some not so successful (for example white type on colour, text printed over an underlying photograph, tiny light sans-serif for captions.) But this is a bold and in many ways surprising volume to feature our nation's main record keepers.
Geoff Adams is a former editor of the Otago Daily Times.
