| Coloured Illustrations of Aquatic Mollusks in China
Wang Rucai, principal writer - Lin Yuan, editor
published 1988, Zhejiang Publishing House of Sci. & Tech, in green cloth boards with printed dust jacket, 255 pages, book size is 7½ by 10½ inches (19.5 by 26.5 cm) more than 100 page size color plates, in Chinese with English abstract of only a few pages
This is yet another of those books that I sometimes come across that I never thought existed before. On my visits to China I always try to haunt the bookshops looking for shell books and most often return home empty handed. So needless to say I was sort of dumbstruck when I came across a of this book in Canada. It is another of the books that serve to document the local fauna of a given place. In this case a rather large place, China and in the book you will find about 700 different aquatic species of mollusks of all classes, mostly marine but a few pages of fresh water shells are included. These shells are all illustrated on color plates in what looks like some good photography but marred by poor color separation of the plates giving many of the shells a color cast that is either too red or too green. You have to remember that the China of 1988 is a very long way of 2008 in so far as finances and production capability. I will say that the plates do allow for shell identification if you disregard the often strange looking colors. I did not check the book for identification "correctness" but my flip test (open the book randomly in several different places and check the identifications on those pages" reveals a pretty good record of the authors being "on the money" most of the time. I don't think that this book will have a great deal of appeal here since apart from the abstract it is entirely in Chinese, but for the hardcore shell book library or shell book collector this is a really unique item. This is a used copy but it is in very fine condition. The jacket is protected in a clear mylar sleeve. The name of teh previous owner is written on the flyleaf and it looks like the name of a prior owner has been coated out with "white-out". There is a small bump on the lower edge of the front cover but in every other respect it looks as if it is a new book. I am going to make a guess that this book is the Chinese version of the "Coloured Illustrations of the Shells of Japan" a generation earlier than this.
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