Mushrooms Paperback – Unabridged, 18 August 2006

Very helpful

Pictures aren't great for identifying. Found some mistakes with improperly labelled species, which could be deadly....Regret buying online.. better to go to a bookstore and peruse before you buy.

It's a lovely book, I bought it for various reasons: I am a keen lover of fungi, like to pick or photograph them in the woods and this book is so well done. It presents the species from different angles of view and in various life stages. I also bought it as reference for my art. The book is great to draw or paint from. The quality of the arranged photos, print, colour and paper is simply outstanding.

Buon testo,in inglese,con descrizioni accurate di generi e specie.Buona la documentazione fotografica.

I received the Phillip's guide to "Common and Important Mushrooms" , and I like the way the book is laid out. It has a lot of great photographs that show the 'shrooms in their various stages of development, including the stipes and veils (if applicable)which is very helpful in identifying them. The only beef I had was: this book is set up primarily for mushroom hunters in Britain, not the US... The book itself is great, but be cognizant of the fact that it doesn't speak to readers in the US.

Phillips' book is compact, beautiful, well-organised, and somewhat too large and heavy to take into the field.Phillips has studied fungi for 30 years, as well as producing excellent guides to other areas of natural history, such as grasses, trees, herbs, and wild food. There can be no doubt, though, that fungi are more of a challenge, and his skill and experience are visible in this book.One choice is immediately obvious: most of the colour plates are wonderful photographs - almost as clear as traditional field-guide paintings - with fresh specimens young and mature, whole and sectioned, cap and stem, carefully arranged on coloured paper. This is an interesting and intelligent choice, a deliberate compromise between the analytic clarity of paintings and the desire to show the inevitable colour variation and imperfection of real specimens - while stopping short of trying to show the environment of every species. Actually, Phillips sometimes also includes an image taken in the wild, or else includes a fern-frond, pine-cone or sprig of moss to show where you may find the species.The page design is clean and inviting; the text is quite small but legible, and the style quite discursive for a guidebook. However, the descriptions are detailed and systematic.Attributes listed are cap, stem, flesh, gills, spores, habitat, and edibility, on which last Phillips is very detailed. Dimensions are indicated by saying the illustration is 40% life size, etc, which is not quite as handy as giving an actual size but good enough.I found this an excellent book for actual identification. If you are going to take photographs to help in identifying your finds, you could do well to copy Phillips' style here and arrange specimens on card with sections, caps etc, with perhaps a small coin or ruler for scale. Then when you want to know whether the gills are free or adnate, you will be able to find out.Phillips and his publisher have made a really serious effort to make identifying fungi easier and more fun. They have found English names for the groups - Coral Fungi, Jelly Fungi, Morels, Finger & Disc Fungi, and so on. Admittedly the largest group of Basidiomycetes is simply "Mushrooms with Gills", and this occupies 250 pages of the book (out of 382). So there is no real alternative to Latin names for the genera.But Phillips has another trick up his sleeve here: a wonderful Visual Index over 3 pages to the 35 main genera - the richly coloured Russula, the shiny Hygrocybe (Waxcaps), the fragile Mycena (Bonnets) and so on. Each index entry has a fine thumbnail photograph and a matching square of about 50 words summarising the nature of the genus. It is ingenious, beautiful, and genuinely helpful - I think you will find you get to the right genus in under a minute for many specimens.The glossary, by contrast, is a bit heavy and traditional - why ever did he choose to say Infundibuliform when Funnel-shaped would have done better? And it is not illustrated.If this book fitted into a pocket, it would be almost perfect. As it is, it is a delight in the study - or in the kitchen for after a mushroom-hunt: Phillips offers careful advice on choosing safe and edible mushrooms. If you are looking for just one mushroom book, this is an excellent choice, unless you want a field-guide.