Collection: Vintage Mushroom

Eighty plates from Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux, published in Paris in 1891 by Léon Dufour, restored sheet by sheet for printing at home on US Letter paper.

Every plate was read figure by figure rather than copied from a catalogue. Each of the two hundred figures carries the Latin binomial as the printer set it, the French vernacular beside it, and the name a botanist would use today — which for a hundred and one of them is a different name. The 1891 edibility marks are transcribed exactly as printed and always with their date, because they are a record of what was believed in 1891 and not advice.

The reading is the work. It is done by someone trained in linguistics, which is mostly a matter of noticing when two names are the same word and when they only look like it.