| Book of Indian Shells
by Deepak Apte
1998, Oxford Univ. Press, hard covers with printed jacket, about 5½ by8½ inches (13.5 by 22cm) 115 pages, 13 page sized color plates, 4 colored figures and black and white drawings.
This book was very popular for a few years and then it sort of dropped
out of sight. I was just able to find several new copies It is very
difficult to find much in the way of literature for the shells found
off India. Considering the size of the coast of the sub-continent you
would think that there would be more written about the shells. While
this book does cover the mollusks (gastropods and bivalves only) found
off the Indian coast you will find that almost without exception the
species described and illustrated are the more common shells which have
been treated in many other general shell books and in other books on
the shells of the Indo-Pacific. Many of the illustrations are small ,
there are as many as 29 species on some of the plates and
frankly the color separations that were used to reproduce the plates are
far from the best. Yet even with these faults the book has merit as a
quick reference check list for the more common Indian shells and to his
credit the author does a good job with his descriptions of the shells
and obviously has a lot of time invested in researching this book. These are new copies of this book. |
