Bookshelf Fungi
field guide. Te sections comprise Introduction (About this Guide, What Are Mushrooms? Mushroom Life Cycles, Ecological Roles, How to Use this Guide, Species Descriptions, Collecting and Eating Wild Mushrooms, Other Ways to Enjoy Mushrooms, Other Resources, References Cited), Guide to Mushroom Groups (the book’s only “key”), Mushroom Descriptions (Veined, Gilled [broken down by spore color and taxonomic subgroups], Boletes, Toothed, Clubs, Corals, Polypores, Jelly Fungi, Puffballs, Bird’s Nest Fungi, Morels and Similar, Cups, Truffles, Other Fungi), Acknowledgments, Glossary, Credits, and Index. Each of the 350 species descriptions
Mushrooms of
British Columbia Andy MacKinnon and Kem Luther 2021, Royal BC Museum Handbook (
https://publications.royalbcmuseum.
bc.ca/) ISBN 978-07726-795-5-0 (Paperback, 5.5 × 8.5 inches, 504 pages) $29.95 (USA) / $34.95 (Canada); ebook $14.99 / $17.99
A
fter more than 50 years, British Columbia (BC) has a new mushroom
field guide, but one with a familiar home. In 1964, the Royal BC Museum published Guide to Common Mushrooms of British Columbia by Robert Bandoni and Adam Szczawinski as part of its Handbook series, which MacKinnon and Luther’s offering now joins. Andy MacKinnon is a forest ecologist
and co-author of six previous books, including Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast (usually just referred to hereabouts as “Pojar and MacKinnon”). He’s past president of the South Vancouver Island Mycological Society and has been known to sing about mycorrhizas to the tune of the Troggs’ 1960s hit, Love Is All Around. Kem Luther is former
48 FUNGI Volume 15:1 Winter 2022
dean of a communications, culture, and information technology program at the University of Toronto. Since the 1990s he has focused on writing interpretive articles and books. Both live on the south coast of Vancouver Island. Teir intent was to produce a
guide specific to BC for anyone wanting to know about the province’s mushrooms, whether to study them with scientific goals, harvest them for the table (seemingly the largest target audience given the frequent reference to “foraging,” which means to search for food), or photograph them. Te 350 species were chosen to represent BC’s most common and more easily identified mushrooms, as well as some less common, but distinctive, species. Te book clearly is aimed at those with relatively little experience with mushrooms — species are referred to by common names throughout, anything resembling a technical term has been avoided (although many unused terms are included in the glossary), and no information on microscopic features is included, even when essential for an accurate identification. Te organization is typical for a
occupies a single page and includes a generously-sized photo (kudos for that), the mushroom’s names (both common and scientific [without author], with the common name emphasized), macromorphological features of cap, gills/pores/teeth/veins, latex, odor, taste, spore color, stem, ring, volva, “fruiting” (habit, substrate, habitat, season), edibility, similar species, and comments, the latter nearly always including the meaning of the species epithet and sometimes that of the genus as well. Te names are as up-to-date as can be expected, given that it’s almost guaranteed that some will change between the time the manuscript is completed and the book is printed and hits the street. Most of the recent names are used in the headings, but some appear in the Comments section. Te text is clear and well written, and side-bar-type diversions, such as discussions of dyeing with mushrooms and the possible effects of climate change on fungi, are scattered among the species accounts to shed light on various aspects of mushrooming. Te photos were provided by roughly
60 contributors (fewer than 10 were taken by the authors) so their quality varies widely. Quite a few are excellent (including the very attractive cover shot), most are good (although some of these had their tops unaesthetically chopped off to increase room for text), and the color rendition is good. However, a handful are poorly exposed and/or don’t show the mushrooms at all well and should never have found their way into a book. A number are attractive pictorial shots that don’t show the key
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