At first glance the plates in Mandy Barker’s *Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals* look like a nineteenth-century naturalist’s record: pale specimens, careful labels, the orderly silence of a survey made long ago. Look again and the specimens are fragments of plastic, collected along the County Cork coast of Ireland near Fota Island and photographed as though they were plankton. The conceit is exact, and it governs everything in the book.

Barker, a British photographer whose subject is marine plastic debris, treats these objects as specimen studies — each isolated against a soft ground, numbered, named, and supplied with pseudo-scientific annotation. With the designer Tiffany Jones, she borrowed the typography and page structure of an antiquarian field guide, so that reading the book reproduces the confusion it describes: the growing difficulty of telling a living organism from what we have discarded.

The argument sits in the form rather than in any statement. Microplastics now occupy the same water column as plankton, entering the food chain at its lowest and most consequential level, and the book’s calm taxonomic beauty makes that fact harder to wave away than any alarm. Overlapse published the 104-page hardcover in May 2017; the following year it was named among Smithsonian Magazine’s ten best photography books of 2017.

For collectors, the first trade edition has its own case to make: a compact hardcover, now out of print from the publisher, that reads as a single considered object rather than a gathering of pictures. Its plates reward slow looking, since the eye keeps trying to complete the illusion and keeps failing. Placed beside Barker’s later Altered Ocean, it marks the point at which her environmental inquiry took its most exacting and most unsettling shape.

Quietly, the book also restores a lineage. Its specimen pages recall the nineteenth-century albums of algae and botanical cyanotypes made by women working at the edge of science and image-making, and Barker pushes that inheritance into the present, where the naturalist’s careful description now documents what industry has left in the sea.