Mushrooms Demystified - A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi

by David Arora
1979

Our Take

The most influential ID book of my generation. Still awesome.

Highly Recommended

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About the Book

Since it first came out, Mushrooms Demystified has been called the bible of North American mushroom identification. Arora wrote it for people who want to identify mushrooms properly rather than flip through pictures and guess.

The core of the book is its dichotomous keys. They take you step by step from “what is this?” to a confident ID, using spore color, gill attachment, odor, texture, and habitat. The species accounts are thorough and the photographs plentiful. Arora is direct about edibility and toxicity, so the book works as a safety reference as well as an ID guide. There’s also good material on how to collect, how to make spore prints, and how mushrooms fit into the ecosystems where you find them.

What makes people love it is Arora’s voice. He’s knowledgeable, irreverent, and often laugh-out-loud funny, which makes a technical tome something you’ll want to read cover to cover. The coverage leans toward the West Coast, but the keys and species descriptions are useful across North America.

It’s a hefty book for foragers past the beginner stage who are ready to learn mushrooms in depth.

Deets

Author: David Arora
Edition: Second
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0898151694
ISBN-13: 978-0898151695