Customer Reviews

American Spiders and their Spinningwork, Book 1: Text and Figures

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Where has this book been all my 40 years of studying spiders. I am enjoying it thoroughly. Would liked to have had it when I first started to study spiders about the age of 12. Will recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in American spiders.

The Reverend Henry McCook was a well-known American naturalist and clergyman in the United States during the last half of the Nineteenth Century. He was a remarkable writer and his "American Spiders and Their Spinning Work" was a prodigious undertaking. The three volumes that were originally published privately (a total run of 250 copies) are now so rare as to be beyond the pocket book of all but the most well-healed book collector. Finally Coachwhip Publications in Pennsylvania has reprinted three of the volumes in a single soft-bound edition of text and figures and the color plates that made up part of Volume II and III in a separate (and very inexpensive) second volume. Although the taxonomy is quite out of date for many of the spiders described, McCook had a remarkable knowledge of the subject and covers not only web-spinning spiders (primarily orb-weavers) but some aspects of nearly all spider biology as it was known in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His descriptions of spider courtship include data collected by George and Elizabeth Peckham, who's primary publications on jumping spiders still serve as references to this day. The first volume in the current printing is over 800 pages long and the color plates and their captions take up another 50 pages. The first volume also has numerous text figures and the biological information is as fresh as it was when it come from the pen of the author. The publisher has done a great service for arachnologists and general naturalists by producing an inexpensive and well printed copy of this classical and nearly impossible to get work by an excellent naturalist.

I recommend this work highly and for the price one should also get the volume of color plates as well.