I’ve recently been looking at some old mushrooming books that are now, due to their age, in the public domain.
These books are freely available for download from The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) but you may also download them from here.
The Musroom; Edible or Otherwise by Miron Elisha Hard MA was first published in 1908 (more details at This book’s page at The Internet Archive.)
The full title of the book is… The mushroom, edible and otherwise, its habitat and its time of growth, with photographic illustrations of nearly all the common species : a guide to the study of mushrooms, with special reference to the edible and poisonous varieties, with a view of opening up to the student of nature a wide field of useful and interesting knowledge. Now, imagine trying to order that over the telephone!
The book is 630 pages long (almost as long as its full title!) and includes hundreds of black and white photographs.
The book starts with this lovely tale….
WHY STUDY MUSHROOMS.
Some years ago, while in charge of the schools of Salem, Ohio, we had worked up quite a general interest in the study of botany.
It was my practice to go out every day after flowers, especially the rarer ones, of which there were many in this county, and bring in specimens for the classes.
There was in the city a wire nail mill, running day and night, whose proprietors brought over, from time to time, large numbers of Bohemians as workers in the mill.
Very frequently, when driving to the country early in the morning, I found the boys and girls of these Bohemian families searching the woods, fields and pastures at some distance from town, although they had not been in this country more than a week or two and could not speak a word of English.
I soon found that they were gathering mushrooms of various kinds and taking them home for food material.
They could not tell me how they knew them, but I quickly learned that they knew them from their general characteristics, in fact, they knew them as we know people and flowers.
The recipe section towards the end of the book contains some very relevant and sensible advice about cooking mushrooms. Such as…The Mushroom Book may be downloaded by right clicking here and choosing to save as (it might read Save Link As on some browsers.)