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Title: Shells (Smithsonian Handbooks)
ISBN: 0789489872
Author:
S Dance
Publicate Date: 2002-05-15
Publish: 2002-05-15
List Price: $20.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $11.17
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $8.95
Amazon Merchant Price: $13.60
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Great book for beginners
This is a book with lots of photos and information of each shell: description, where you can find it, size, if it's rare or not, taxonomy and much more. I think this is a great book for people who are just starting the art of shell collecting.
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2: Excellent!
Shells is an excellent reference book for the beginner or seasoned shell collecter. The color photos are excellent and the general maps are helpful.
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3: Great Book.
i love shells, I love knowing as much as I can about them and this book is great. The pictures them selfs are well worth the money but then you get all the great info about shells, things i did not know and is hard to find. the book is very enjoyable and full to spend time in.s
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4: An ok beginner collector book
All collectors become well aware of the two most famous shell book authors as they enter a journey into this hobby; R Tucker Abbott and Peter Dance. Dance has written this book as a general shell book of world wide shells, more to promote interest than being a particularly useful field identification guide. There are at last count, somewhere around 80,000 members of the mollusks; clearly any shell book has to take that into account and only the more popular species are going to be present.
What Dance has is some representaive members of the more popular species the casual collector is likely to find or purchase. While I like the clean photographs I find the ranges that are listed for the different species are a bit too general. But again, this is a book to get one started in the hobby.
While getting very long in the tooth, don't overlook Abbotts Golden Guide of seahells for the beginner. It is a surpringly good intro book as long as you don't take the relative abundance of species listed too seriously (In other words don't put a morgage down on a Glory-of-the-Seas you'll likely be making a poor investment!).
A much better general shell book once you've found you really can't id all your worldwide shells is the Abbott/Dance Compendium of Seashells. It helps ID well over 4,000 species. Otherwise use regional guides of which there are numerous examples such as Seashells of North America: A Guide to Field Identification (Abbott).
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5: Asian shells
Don't buy this book (Smithsonian?--US?) unless you are interested in shells of SE Asia.
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