FUNGI COLLECTED IN SHROPSHIRE AND OTHER NEIGHBOURHOODS

Sub-titled 'A Victorian Woman's Illustrated Field Notes' this beautifully made clothbound hardback has a tipped in illustration on the front, marbled endpapers and facsimile reproductions of exquisite colour illustrations of mushrooms, and illuminated title pages. Venture into the woods alongside a pioneering female mycologist. Very little is known about M. F. Lewis, not even her first name. Mysterious, prolific, and deeply enamoured with the world of mushrooms, she left us a treasure trove of mycological illustrations. For over 40 years from 1860 to 1902 she rambled across England and Wales, recording an astonishing biodiversity of fungi. Her delicately drawn, boldly coloured images evoke the strange and powerful beauty of this fungi and this handsome volume collects hundreds of her watercolours, with an introduction about the legacy of female naturalists in the Victorian era. There are red caps and dotted mushrooms, peaked obelisks to the strawberry heart, tall columns of orange or yellow, flat-topped white ones, floppy browns and daring petals of yellow, spots and contours, and each example is annotated in her own handwriting. When Cornell University Library acquired three volumes of her illustrations, the following pages of notes at the back of the book were appended which helps readers identify the mushrooms in the illustrations. The book is an artwork in itself. 168pp.