I could spend paragraphs explaining how significant the recent publication of “Plants of the World; An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Vascular Plants” is to the history of the literature of botany; how it’s “the first book to systematically explore every vascular plant family on earth,” and how it’s “organized in a modern phylogenetic order [with] detailed entries for each family.”
They were special books – you could tell that just from the fact that they were kept in an unique set of shelves all by themselves in my middle school’s library. And of course by their size – they were so large that the set of shelves in which they were kept had a slanted […]
There are times when the publication of a particular new natural history book can only be appropriately reported with song; “Rays of the World” is such a book.
There are those who say that the age of printed atlases is now past; that due to the so much information being available in quickly updatable digital formats that the production of the classic large format books of maps and pertinent geographic information is no longer needed.
Hogwash.