Customer Reviews

The Common Spiders of the United States

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This is a fairly decent reference guide for the more scientific minded reader. The book is full of detailed sketches of spiders, their pieces and their parts.The book falls short, however, in its lack of color photos and its propensity for being altogether too technical. Most people only know spiders by their common names (ie. Black widow- Latrodectus Mactans), so figuring out what your looking at may be difficult while using this book. Saying that, I would recommend the text for spider enthusiasts.

This was a great book in 1902 - the first popular spider guide by someone who knew what he was talking about. Unfortunately, the publishers who reprinted the book never updated its contents. Dover editions contain exactly one page of new material - a "key to families" by an insect specialist (spiders are not insects) which is guaranteed to lead beginners wrong. Now, 100 years after Emerton wrote, essentially every spider species he discussed is known by a different name. The natural-history information, while largely correct, is also 100 years out of date. An arachnologist who already knows the current names of Emerton's spiders can still make use of his excellent drawings and photos, but an interested layperson will only be misled, and would be better off with something more current, such as Levi's "Spiders and their Kin." Incidentally, the reason there are no common names in the book is that 95% of spiders have none!