Re: CP books
Eric Schlosser (ESCHLOSS@urz-mail.urz.uni-heidelberg.de)
Fri, 20 Oct 1995 11:29:52 CET-1CST
Jan Schlauer pointed out that Lloyd's book is (at least) as valuable
as the work of Juniper & Co.
It is correct that sometimes it might seem that the evaluation system
has been used inconsequent, but when I made the first version of an
overview file I tried to take its value for today into consideration.
Otherwise it cannot be understood why a book like e.g. the one by
Darwin got only '**' in science and Lit for audience.
For this time Darwins work was outstanding and certainly dedicated to
the scientist world. The CP nature was not widely accepted because it
didn't fit into the picture of the world at that time. Besides he
already made a good compilation of CP that more or less persisted
till nowadays.
Lloyds book is exceptional because it is very comprehensive and I
know of no other book with a concept like it, but
- it is now 53 years old.
In contrary to this the book of Juniper is a quite recent publication
and treats in spite of all mistakes CPs in a modern way. There's no
alternative with a concept like that.
However every new book must be prepared to be compared to the earlier
ones and it can hardly be understood why so many recent, fat,
expensive publications show so many mistakes. That's why some books
like the one by Cheers, Pietropoaolo, Lecoufle or Braem seem to have
got rather bad marks. They are rather bad compilation of earlier
books (ups, sorry, just a little exaggeration permitted) with some
nice colour pictures, but that is not enough.
As real Milestones in CP-book history I would see (at least) the
following books:
1875 Darwin CP exist! 1906 Diels Mono Drosera 1927 Danser Mono
Nepenthes 1942 Lloyd CP Phenomenon 1966 Casper Mono Pinguicula 1968
Erickson Australian CP 1979 Slack How to grow CP 1983 Kondo colour
pictures ! 1989 Taylor Mono Utricularia 1989 Juniper CP Phenomenon
Take it just as a proposal. It is impossible to create a perfect
list, but they can be more or less useful.
Eric Schlosser