Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An Identification Guide Paperback – October 1, 1996

Thank you for the knowledge!!

This book is a must read for anyone who is interested in psilocybin. Paul Stamets masterfully weaves his expertise, a wide body of research literature, and personal experiences in to an extremely well written, organized, detailed book. The book also includes pictures. Before I had this book, I had assumed that there was only one psilocybin mushroom. Imagine my surprise to learn that psilocybin has many varieties!The book also shows why it is critical for people to either purchase/use verified psilocybin mushrooms or to follow specific steps to ensure any mushrooms that are legally found in the wild are psilocybin. There is a mushroom that looks exactly like psilocybin, but that mushroom is a deadly poison to the human body.

Could have used more pictures but well written

Very impressed with all the pictures & information excellent for career geared mycologists merry Christmas!!

A thoroughly written book, with detailed text; alas, the photos are lacking and low rez a number of times - not what I would like when trying to identify in the field. Cambodginiensis, for instance, is low rez when I tried to expand it in the Kindle version at least. As is an African one earlier growing in a heap of hippo dung. A scientific guide of this caliber should have a standard 3 - position photo with field image, underside of gills, and whole fruit with stem (and in high rez). But it does not, and some have no pix. Hope author corrects and updates, otherwise detailed guide.

This book is written by Paul Stamets, a long standing staple in the Mycology (Study of mushrooms) community. This book provides a brief history of Psilocybin, safety nets for tripping, and identification knowledge out of every pore. This book teaches the 'Stametian' (Of Stamets) method of narrow down and properly identifying species. In the chapter "Major Psilocybin Genera" and onward have these identification pages (see figure 3) that are so dense with facts, and features as well as a nice picture. This book is a MUST HAVE for beginner mycologists, those that want to be able to tell these incredible fungi apart from their potentially lethal counterparts. I wish I had gotten the field guide version because I used this book in the field for the first couple weeks and it took some damage. If you do read this book, I GUARANTEE that you will be craving more knowledge after. Luckily, he also provides a bunch of sources, mycologists, and books that are certainly worth checking out. Happy Hunting!

Oh, he bought a Psilocybin Mushroom book, he must be a trippy hippy! Not even. I am an amateur mycologist and my library was severely lacking in information about the Psilocybin mushroom. Not any more. This book takes up the slack where most other guides were severely lacking. If we don't know this stuff then we can't be fully informed as we study in the field. So say what you will, I will pee in a jar for anybody anytime, as long as you are giving me a paycheck or a physical. That being said...Paul Stamets, is in many ways the ultimate mycologist. He started learning about mushrooms as a logger in the PNW, much the same as I did. But he took it so much further, becoming the author of several books that cover just about everything you would want to know about mushrooms. How to grow them, medicinal studies, inventing things using fungi, you have to check out all the things Paul Stamets has been doing with mushrooms. His book, Mycelium Running, is a resource that could help reshape the environmental movement into something so much more common sense than tree-sitting ever could be. This guy is about as close to a genius as anybody I have seen in the mycology field, yet he still gets a bit overboard on some things fungal. I can't quite agree that mycelium has any sort of thought pattern or intelligence beyond it's genetic instincts. But he has been far more immersed in the subject than I, so maybe in person he could persuade me to think so. But for now I am glad to have this and two other of his books in my mushroom library. Exellent photography and information. Get it.

I love this book. I can’t read enough about mushrooms. This was a very informative book would recommend for any mushroom connoisseur.