New Sierra field guide is the work of an obsessive amateur

The Washington Post reviews "The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada", with its 2,800 illustrations on 366 pages.

It is 366 pages long and contains 2,800 illustrations, each painted by Laws. The new field guide, already praised by outdoor connoisseurs as a naturalist’s bible, begins with "Small Fungi Growing on Wood" (specifically, Calocera cornea, the staghorn jelly fungus) and ends with stars (the night sky at winter solstice). It is small enough to slip into your pocket but includes 1,700 species of flowers, trees, bugs, frogs, snails, skinks, birds, fish and rodents. It took him six years to research and complete. The world needs more of this—this kind of sustained, informed, deep gee-whizdom.
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There is also something sweet and obsessive, and marvelously 19th century about the whole enterprise, the idea of a lone amateur, now 41 years old (living in a rented $600 apartment in San Francisco), spending season after season tramping around the mountains, painting mushrooms and moles. "The pages and pages of bugs, flies, beetles," says Malcolm Margolin, founder of Heyday Books in Berkeley, the nonprofit publisher of the field guide. Margolin says he may not be able to "tell one from another, but isn’t it wondrous that they’re out there? Isn’t that marvelous?"

The guide is organized by color, making it a lot easier for non-experts to identify species quickly. (Via Boing Boing)