Guide to Seashells of the World: A Complete Reference Guide to Shells (Philip's Reference) [Paperback]

This book looks the business at first glance but has little if any practical use. Like most guides which pretend to cover all or a large part of the world's shells, it leaves out far too many species to be useful for identification purposes. Worse still, it is selective in a bizarre way. Only 3 species of cockles for the whole world, and 5 of Venus shell? That wouldn't even cover North Wales. Instead, there are dozens of examples of certain favoured types, such as 29 species of tropical tritons and 34 entire pages devoted to a single genus of cowries! But even that doesn't mean you can identify the one in your collection, as the illustrations seem to be have been photocopied a few times then scanned in to a computer at low resolution before enlarging again, to make sure they are totally fuzzy! Well, that's what they look like, and the 'artist' gets scarcely a mention so maybe the publishers weren't too impressed with the results either. (200 of the 1200 species described are not illustrated at all.) So, it's not a coffee table book either.

The descriptions are mostly clear in themselves, once you have swallowed all the jargon (explained in a glossary), but do not always match the illustrations, especially as regards colours.

I tested this book by buying a bag of assorted tropical shells such as you get in trinket shops in seaside towns everywhere these days. I couldn't identify a single one to the species level. And as for European shells, forget it, they aren't in this book!

Amazon say that the book was published in 2004 but I suspect its origins go back much further as there is an almost identical title by the same author, this time crediting the illustrator, listed as 1975. Maybe that's where they photocopied the illustrations from. Anyway, the author recommends collecting shells by turning stones over to find live specimens and boiling them to get the 'contents' out. There is no indication of which molluscan species included might be expected to tolerate this kind of depradation, and no doubt many of the selection in this book - apparently based on what happened to be available in the author's own collection rather than any rational sampling of the world's seashells - have in fact become endangered by these kind of practices, which I had thought went out with the Victorians. Perhaps it is fortunate that little mention is made of likely habitats in which to find the molluscs either. The whole thing is extraordinary, coming from a well known imprint such as Philip's.

As has been previously noted, at first glance this book looks good, with quality watercolour illustrations and a good thick sheaf of pages.

Sadly in use the book is truly awful. Common names are few and far between, the author preferring to show off his knowledge of the shells' latin names. There is no apparent way of searching for an unknown shell since they are not arranged in any useful way and the index is limited again to latin names. If you knew enough about a shell to find it in this book you'd already know what it was and would not need this useless, expensive waste of time and effort.

I'm using this book for research purposes at the moment, and I'm surprised at the harsh reviews of other reviewers. It is true that it's a much older publication than the Philips imprint would suggest. It was originally published, in an almost identical layout, as the Hamlyn Guide to Shells of the World. It is true that it's short of common names, but in the world of shell classification the Latin forms are vital and I've been hugely grateful for the inclusion of them (and their discoverers and dates) here. The use of drawings rather than photos may seem archaic; but since shell species can vary enormously in their degrees of colour, sculpture and marking, photos can often be more misleading than sketches, especially if the sketches are accompanied by the extremely thorough text descriptions included here. I'm not a shell collector, so I can't comment on the collection methods brutal or otherwise criticised by one reviewer - but it seems to me that if you're going to collect from the wild, you need to dispose of the mollusc within somehow, an act which is never going to be pleasant for the creature. I'm not a vegetarian either, for that matter.

The book is a guide to the shells of the WORLD, and at 1200 species it is only scratching the surface, if you'll pardon the expression. It's not a coffee table book and it doesn't have photos. Look elsewhere if you want those, or if you want a comprehensive guide to British shells or European shells. But it is a pretty thorough overview of the world of molluscs. No worse at doing that job than the Dorling Kindersley photo-glamorous equivalent.