Review: The Observer's Book of Common Fungi

I have a lot of mushroom guides. They come to me in different ways - I buy them, I bid on them on eBay, I receive them as gifts, some have been left in my work mailbox by anonymous donors... but the source of many of the hard-to-find, international, and just downright bizarre books have been those found by my friend, Elizabeth at the bookstore she works at. I've got a pile of them. Most of them are fairly outdated in the sense that the science of mycology has passed them by, either by new discoveries or by classification changes.

But they're fascinating nevertheless.

The Observer's Book of Common Fungi was published in 1958 by Frederick Warne & Co. LTD, as part of an Observer series that included editions on Pond Life, Larger Moths, Railway Locomotives of Britain, and Cacti and Other Succulents, among others. The authorship is credited to E.M. Wakefield and includes one of my favorite features of older guides - full color plates. In this case 32 of them. The descriptions listed in the book, about 200, are British species, though many of them can be found elsewhere.

Wakefield's Introduction begins -

"Soon after the first warm rains of autumn have softened the soil, the floors of our woodlands become carpeted, as if by magic, with a wealth of toadstools, large and small, brightly coloured or sinister-looking, sometimes strange in form, often beautiful."


The Introduction goes on to cover spore germination, life cycles, spore prints, classifications, in descriptions that are wonderfully concise. The 200 individual species descriptions have a personal tone to them and are often written in one long paragraph. Of the Shaggy Ink Cap, he writes -

"This well-known fungus needs little description. It comes up in groups on rich ground in late summer and autumn, and at times becomes a pest on bowling greens and tennis courts which have been laid out over ground containing rubbish ('made ground')."


Many fungi books of this time solely concentrated on mushrooms that were of the traditional cap and stem variety. Here, he is able to sneak in a few pages on shelf, stinkhorn, coral, bird's nest, and other sundry fruiting bodies.

Overall, this is a fun little book. Personable, (Wakefield refers to the Horn of Plenty as "sombre-looking") and informative, and coming in at about 100 pages and measuring an easily pocketable 4x6, it is worth keeping (or adding) to any mycological collection... even if it did have its 50th birthday last year.