(You can buy mushroom books at a discount!)

We live in an age of many mushroom books. Those of us who've been mushrooming for a couple of decades can tell you how happy we were when Dr. Alexander Smith produced those still-useful, slim-jim identification books, The Mushroom Hunter's Field Guide and A Field Guide to Western Mushrooms, published by University of Michigan Press, and how delighted we were when Dr. Orson K. Miller put out a smaller soft-cover version of his Mushrooms of North America.

Now it seems there's a new one out every year, and how can a person know which one will help most? It depends a lot on your learning style. If you prefer diagrams and colored photos, you might try either of these: George Barron's Mushrooms of NE North America (Lone Pine, 1999) or either size of the; Eye Witness Mushrooms, by Thomas Laessoe and Gary Lincoff. I find myself turning to those before I pick up Mushrooms Demystified, by David Arora, if I have a complete unknown in my hand. As you learn to use keys for identification (and it took me longer than I care, to admit), either the older book by Lange and Hora, Mushrooms and Toadstools, or Arora's Mushrooms Demystified will be very useful. Many of us still flip through Gary Lincoff's Audubon Guide to look for a name for what we're looking at, even though the photo colors are sometimes misleading.

And if you just want to have a chuckle and look up your specimen by using the Quick Keys inside the covers of All That the Rain Promises, and More, by David Arora, that's a good way to enjoy yourself and learn at the same time!

Each of these books has been reviewed in detail by Harley Barnhart in Mushroom, the Journal of Wild Mushrooming, if you prefer to read before you spend. He's a fine reviewer, and copies of the Journal are always available from OMS Books or Fungal Cave Books, as well as in the OMS Library.

-- Maggie Rogers

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