Italiano (Italia)
English (UK) 
Book review - Shells of the world. A natural history
Paolo G. Albano
Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, Italy
Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, Italy
M.G. Harasewych
Princeton University Press, 2024. 240 pp., with hundreds of colour illustrations. ISBN 978-0-691-24827-1; 978-0-691-24825-7. Hardcover, £ 25.00.
I started collecting shells as a child in summer 1985. Since the very beginning of my passion for shells I desired learning more about them. My first shell book was delivered at Christmas 1985, incidentally authored by Bruno Sabelli, who became my PhD advisor a couple of decades later. In the following years, I obtained another book from family members and I invested the little money I had in a few more, including Eisenberg’s “Collector’s guide” (that had a translation into Italian), Abbott & Dance’s “Compendium of Seashells” and a guide on Mediterranean shells. That was it for several years, until I discovered the journals La Conchiglia and Bollettino Malacologico that fed me with new information every few months. No internet at the time (can you imagine?!). Those few books and journal issues were my only source of information and I read or simply browsed them countless times, trying to extract every bit of information they contained. It was the time when I acquired the systematic arrangement of taxa without ever intentionally studying it, to the point that today I am severely disturbed by species lists in alphabetic order that are still embarrassingly common even in the ‘professional’ scientific literature. Not only I wanted to learn how to identify shells, but I was also very curious about where molluscs live both geographically and ecologically.
Princeton University Press, 2024. 240 pp., with hundreds of colour illustrations. ISBN 978-0-691-24827-1; 978-0-691-24825-7. Hardcover, £ 25.00.
I started collecting shells as a child in summer 1985. Since the very beginning of my passion for shells I desired learning more about them. My first shell book was delivered at Christmas 1985, incidentally authored by Bruno Sabelli, who became my PhD advisor a couple of decades later. In the following years, I obtained another book from family members and I invested the little money I had in a few more, including Eisenberg’s “Collector’s guide” (that had a translation into Italian), Abbott & Dance’s “Compendium of Seashells” and a guide on Mediterranean shells. That was it for several years, until I discovered the journals La Conchiglia and Bollettino Malacologico that fed me with new information every few months. No internet at the time (can you imagine?!). Those few books and journal issues were my only source of information and I read or simply browsed them countless times, trying to extract every bit of information they contained. It was the time when I acquired the systematic arrangement of taxa without ever intentionally studying it, to the point that today I am severely disturbed by species lists in alphabetic order that are still embarrassingly common even in the ‘professional’ scientific literature. Not only I wanted to learn how to identify shells, but I was also very curious about where molluscs live both geographically and ecologically.