Guides to land snails? (Europe + Mediterranean)

[Schnäggli]

I'm especially interested in land snails from Europe (including the Mediterranean area) but I haven't had much luck finding good guides/handbooks to ID them.

I found a bibliography on the petsnail main site ( www.petsnails.co.uk/noindex/books.html ) and on Robert's Weichtiere website ( www.weichtiere.at/english/ ) but most of these guides deal with British snails only.

Robert listed more books (in German) here: www.weichtiere.at/Schnecken/land/weinberg/seiten/literatur.html and here:www.weichtiere.at/literatur/bestimmung.html
Of those, I think I'll try and get the following ones (but they are a bit old and I don't know if I will have any luck finding them ):

- Pfleger, V. (1984): Schnecken und Muscheln Europas: Land- und Süßwasserarten. ←(includes bivalves and water species, maybe it's not specific enough?)
- Kerney, M.P., Cameron, R.A.D., Jungbluth, J.H. (1983): Die Landschnecken Nord- und Mitteleuropas. ←(northern/central european species - maybe does not include Mediterranean areas? )
- Turner, H. et al. (1998): Atlas der Mollusken der Schweiz und Liechtensteins ←(Yay! Switzerland! ;D This could come in handy)

Does anybody know these books and could tell me if they are any good?

I'd like to get a book (or different books for different European areas) with as many species as possible and illustrations (or photos) to ID the snails, and information on them (habitat, diet, etc).

Are there any field guides you could suggest, especially for western Mediterranean snails? It doesn't have to be in English - French, German, Italian or Spanish are fine too.

Thanks in advance!

[wolf]

Hi,
Kerney, Cameron & Jungbluth is excellent and very helpful. There is some short section included about the mediterranean species of France (about 25 pages).
More species of the mediterranean area are described and figured in
Fechter, R. & G. Falkner: Weichtiere, Mosaik Verlag München, 1990 (Steinbachs Naturführer). The parts concerning the fresh water and terrestrial species are brilliant.
Very useful for Italy is
Cossignani, T. & V.: Atlante delle Conchiglie terrestri e dulciacquicole Italiane, L'Informatore Piceno, Ancona 1995. No text, but pretty and very useful pictures.
And then, of course, there is
Beckmann, K.-H.: Die Land- und Süßwassermollusken der Balearischen Inseln, Conchbooks, Hackenheim 2007.
And so on, and so on....... . For some areas you have to go down to original articles in special journals and/or the original descriptions of the species.
Kind regards: wolf

[Schnäggli]

Hi Wolf, thanks for the reply and the helpful information!

I'll see if I can get my hands on Die Landschnecken Nord- und Mitteleuropas. It's unavailable on Amazon.de but maybe I could find it at the library.

I'll keep my eyes open for other books too. And if anyone wants to suggest more, don't be shy.

[coyote]

Try looking for it on abebooks.com, a world-wide network of second-hand (and new) booksellers. Many out-of-print and hard-to-find titles can be found there, often at a discount price.

[wolf]

Thanks for the link, coyote!
Regards: wolf

[Timm Adam]

Hello,

even better is www.eurobuch.com

There all the bookshops (abebboks, amazon and a vast number of small bookshops from all over the world) are in one database and you can search them all at once. So far I have found all the books there I have needed on invertebrates, some very rare like on the millipedes of Madagascar from 1902.

And of course the first address is very close to me and his daughter even is a colleague of my wife: K. Groh with his publishing house and bookshop www.conchbooks.de/
I should suspect if you don´t get it there and it is on Gastropoda it doesn´t exist...........

Regards

Timm