Two new photo books -- “Florida's Northwest” and “Ivan's Wake” -- sit side-by-side on the shelves of many area book stores and gift shops depicting the area in compelling yet vastly different ways.
“Ivan's Wake” is a book by the Pensacola News Journal that portrays the devastation left in Hurricane Ivan's wake.
“Florida's Northwest” is an eye-catching pictorial of the landscapes and landmarks of Northwest Florida captured through the lens of Pensacola photographer Michael O'Donovan and through the words of Pensacola travel writer Robin Rowan.
“People will buy the books for different reasons,” said O'Donovan, 50, a fourth-generation Pensacola resident who has been capturing the region's natural splendor on film for 30 years.
“Some will buy the hurricane book for historical significance, and others will buy my book to have a book of natural beauty on the coffee table that is more uplifting,” he said.
“We do need something that reminds us of what we had and what we will have once the rebuilding is done and the sand dunes start coming back and debris is cleaned up.”
Surprisingly, most of the photos of coastline, marshes, waterways, landmarks and wildlife in O'Donovan's 130-page, hard-cover book were snapped after Ivan.
“You just have to look past the debris and destruction and look for the beauty,” O'Donovan said about finding the images.
Many Pensacola-area residents who have one of the 10,000 copies of O'Donovan's first book, “Island,” a beautiful pictorial of the pristine sand, surf and coastal creatures of Santa Rosa Island, published in 1996, will see a few similar images in his newest book.
But “Florida's Northwest: First Places, Wild Places, Favorite Places,” published by O'Donovan's Pensacola-based Terra Nova Publishing company, takes a wider view of the coastal region -- 200 miles between Perdido Key and Tallahassee -- through photos and text that introduce readers to many places they might not have discovered.
“It has a more thorough explanation through text,” he said. “The other book had four or five pages of text. This has over 30 pages.”
O'Donovan joined forces with Rowan, also a longtime Florida resident, to create “Florida Northwest.” Together they take readers on a trip that weaves through the area's rich history, fragile ecosystem, trendy must-sees and quirky less-traveled sites such as the roadside souvenir shops in Apalachicola that hawk “alligator jerky, air plants and shell nightlights.”
The book has been a hit with readers since reaching the stores about three weeks ago, booksellers say. About 800 copies have sold for $34.95 as of Tuesday.
Susan Finnan, the owner of Pappillons gift store in Publix's shopping center in Navarre, just got her first copies Tuesday and had no doubt they'd fly off the shelves.
“We couldn't keep his previous book in stock,” she said. “Realtors purchased them for real estate closings, people bought them for going away gifts. This new book is even better.”
She said it complements the News Journal's “Ivan's Wake.”
“I sold out of the 'Ivan' book over the weekend,” Finnan said. “We just got 20 more copies. It's nice to look at that book and look at this book and see that beauty still survives.”
Surviving is actually at the heart of O'Donovan's book.
“I call it a coffee table book with an edge,” he said.
“It has an environmental undertone,” he said. “We are coming to an environmental crossroads with all of the development and stresses put on the environment.”
“We're not trying to force feed the message, but we want to make people aware that a lot of this covered in the book shows the precarious situation we are in and if we, the silent majority, don't become more active about how growth goes, we will pay for the consequences in the future,” he said.
