This is the book I’ve taken with me for the last decade when I want a fungi field guide. I was pleasantly surprised to see another well-known foraging anorak recommend the same. An excellent fungi field guide covering some 360 species of fungi in Britain and Ireland. One of the reasons this guide is so useful to the forager is that it contains edibility information and some well-thought-out layouts to help you begin the identification process in the field.
The use of icons was the main inspiration for my plant and fungi listings on this website.
Whilst this book is out of print, the canny shopper can still grab it for a couple of quid. I had my copy for over a decade before giving it to a friend to use… we all know how that goes. Last year, I picked up another copy for £2 from an online second-hand bookshop. Handily, it had come from a library, so it still had the vinyl cover on that libraries often use! They do get listed for a lot more, but with a bit of patience, one can still be found dirt cheap.
A true field guide, there is enough information on fungi species to get you started. Divided into fungi with pores, fungi with gills, and other fungi, each of these is then arranged by spore colour and gill attachment. The latter arrangement is my only niggle. Whilst the divisions of pores/gills/other are colour-tabbed for really quick access to those pages, the spore colour/gill attachment section isn’t. It’s not a real issue, as there’s a reference on the front and back covers to those pages, but it’s something that could have been easily included to make accessing those pages even easier.