One of the real difficulties for amateur mushroom hunters is deciding how to get started. While many rely on local "experts", others prefer to learn it for themselves, but then they have to decide which books they can trust to get started with. Well, I have some suggestions which may help, and some annotations concerning my dozen best selections. These, again are the opinion of a mid-range amateur, and the way you value books may differ considerably from mine. I will also confess some prejudice in favor of the first books from which I learned identification skills.

I have some personal standards for preferred books, listed below in roughly decreasing importance. You might be surprised to see me including some older Dover reprints, but those older books relied a lot more on good descriptions than they did on photos. Watch out, though for nomenclature changes: One of our family favorites, commonly called "blewits", or "wood blewit" has been known variously as "lepista nuda", "tricholoma nudum", "tricholoma personatum", "rhodopaxillus nuda", "gyrophila nuda", and "clitocybe nuda", the latter being the most popular of late.

Ralph's Book Criteria

• Books should have a key: a series of questions starting with spore print color, and getting down to very small details as the answer to each question branches further down to more questions, ending with a species

• Keys should be a little bit forgiving: If I have a subtle difference in opinion about gill connectivity, or whether a spore print is purplish black vs black, the key should guide me back rather than leaving me in a clearly wrong selection

• Primary emphasis should be on identification far more than on edibility

• Photos should be of adequate quality to help validate the text identification, including evidence of special features

• Text should differentiate within context of an edible species, others which amateurs may confuse with it

• Text should contain clear safety rules for beginners, about identifying, first taste, discriminating

• It's really nice when books have enough species that it gets difficult to find one not covered. Unforgiving keys and small numbers leave beginners in lots of dead-ends

• My favorite books include non-key details which characterize a species such as the faintly anise aroma of pleurotus ostreatus, or the little black beetles which run around in its gills, or the faint odor of bleach or almonds associated with large messes of marasmius oreades, or the deeper green of grass near their fairy rings, or something about which trees the species is most associated with

• I like to see a good glossary at the back of the book: technical terms, while perhaps confusing to the beginner, help paint very specific verbal pictures of species

• I think it helps to identify a few good species which are lower in risk for beginners to start with, but I don't go along with the "foolproof" label - I've met too many talented fools for that

• It's nice to have a bit of background information about mushrooms, mushroom growth and habitats

• Good North American field guides stick to North American Species....Learning what we have around here is tough enough without the added confusion of European look-alikes...Similar criteria should apply to European books

Ralph's Favorite Books

title	author	publisher	year	species	score	comments
Mushrooms Demystified	David Arora	Ten Speed	1986	2000	90%	pix mostly b/w, text entertaining, good differentiation, excellent tech ref's
Mushroom Hunter's Field Guide	Smith & Weber	U Mich	1980	282	83%	rigid key, good beginners info
Mushrooms of North America	Orson K Miller	Dutton	1977	422	75%	good key, good pix, good charact, weak rules
Foraging for Edible Wild Mushrooms	Haard & Haard	Cloudburst	1978	36	75%	rigid key, good beginners info, mostly b/w pix, good differentiation, too few species
The Mushroom Manual	Lorentz C. Pearson	Naturegraph	1987	300	71%	good key, good beginners info, b/w sketches, good for beginners, good differentiation
The Gilled Mushrooms of Michigan (two vol's)	C.H. Kauffman	Dover	(1918)	884	69%	good key, b/w photos, fair differentiation, unique characteristics
Mushrooms (Peterson Field Guide)	McKnight & McKnight	Houghton Mifflin	1987	500	68%	no key, color sketches, good differentiation, good rules
Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms	Gary Lincoff	Knopf	1981	756	61%	pictorial key, good color photos, good differentiation
Macmillan Field Guide Mushrooms	Bessette & Sundberg	Macmillan	1987	200	55%	no key, color photos, good differentiation, good rules, spore data
Mushrooms of North America	Roger Phillips	Little Brown	1991	1000	50%	fair key, color photos, no differentiation
One Thousand American Fungi	McIlvane & Macadam	Dover	(1902)	1000	50%	fair key, b/w sketches, little differentiation, fair on unique features
Simon & Schuster's Guide to Mushrooms	Gary Lincoff	Fireside	1981	420	49%	good key, good color photos, admixes European species

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photos and artwork © Ralph Czerepinski 1996

Thursday, 29-Feb-96 18:20:21 EST