American Spiders. (Hardcover)

by Willis John Gertsch (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 274 pages
• Publisher: Van Nostrand Reinhold; 2 edition (January 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0442226497
• ISBN-13: 978-0442226497
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,331,723 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Spiders remains the definitive work on the subject, September 16, 2003

By	"tab1017" (Lake Havasu City, AZ) - See all my reviews

For scholars of the Phylum Arthropoda with a particular interest in the Class Arachnida and the Order Araneae, American Spiders by Willis J. Gertsch remains the definitive work on the subject to this day. Although parts of it were copyright as early as 1949 and the entire volume again in 1979, no work on spiders even approaches its depth, save for The Spider Book by Comstock, a compendium that was published at the turn of the last century and which is out of date, as a result. In contrast, any serious student of spiders will find American Spiders the most complete work on the subject that is at the same time well-organized, easily understandable, and well-illustrated. The primary problem is it's rarity. More recent treatments of the subject, although not so scholarly, have the advantage of brevity and a host of beautiful color pictures. The books by Rod and Ken Preston-Mafham (Spiders of the World, and The Book of Spiders and Scorpions) come to mind most prominently. There was also an obscure but very interesting paper written by a graduate student at the University of Nebraska (his name was Becker, I believe). He had apparently read all of the major works about spiders and synthesized an original if brief approach that corrected errors in each of them, utilizing photos and illustrations from those resources to accomplish it. As such, it was not published nor is it available for perousal by the general public, at least not as of this writing. In any case, to this day, nothing quite matches Gertsch's book on the subject of American spiders.