Review: Simon & Schuster's Guide to Mushrooms

When I lead mushroom walks I get a variety of people for a variety of reasons. But the one thing that stays the same for ALL the walks I do is the same set of questions I get asked: 

• "Are we going to see any hallucinogens?"
• "Can I eat that one?"

• "Can you recommend a good field guide?"

I'm going to skirt answering all three!  Actually the third question is the one I'm going to tackle in this post.  Well sort of.  This will be the first in a series of looks at popular field guides that can be found at many bookstores.  (I probably should say online bookstores.)

The Simon & Schuster guide was originally published in Italy under the title Funghi in 1980.  The English translation came the next year.  I point this out because much of the guide feels like a translation.  It's a bit of a bore actually.  The photos are fairly run-of-the-mill.  Many are quite "muddy" in appearance.  Some care was taken with them, as they do show many of the key identifiers (gills, habitat) in detail. But many of the smaller fruiting bodies (Mycena, Marasmius) are taken from a distance that ID is nearly impossible, or worse, the background is so similar to the mushroom that they are difficult to even see.

It does not promote itself as a North American field guide which is good because there are many entries that are not found in North America.  A lot of people forget about this when buying a guide.  (We did, on our first purchase... more on that in a later post.)  You spend time narrowing down your mushroom only to find it isn't even on this continent.  (And then are left wondering, exactly what was it that you found.)

It does include a key, which is an important part of a good guide, but it seems more of an afterthought - the spacing of the lines is difficult to parse and there is no glossary of many of the descriptive words that are used in the key... so you'll need to look up "ramified," and "ostioles," and "peridium," and a slew of others.

It includes a somewhat laughable edibility legend with a strange red-shaped intersection for "poisonous."  One fork for "good" edibility and two forks for "excellent."  Now I don't know about you but if I want to ID a mushroom that might cause extreme vomiting I want something that looks a bit threatening.  I suppose the red intersection could be one of those dangerous intersections where the streetlights are blinking yellows in two directions, or there's an incompetent crossing guard or something, but I don't feel properly warned... in fact it kind of looks like four shrimp toasts on a plate.  Or maybe I'm just hungry.

One thing I do like is that it includes the etymology for the entry, so you can figure out where some of these seemingly odd scientific names come from.  This is the one feature that keeps this guide on my bookshelf.

Pros:

- portable
- etymological entries

Cons:

- whole book (descriptions, pictures, key) feels seriously outdated

- too much space taken up with silly symbols

Overall, you can do a lot better.