A Book of Spiders

"Part of the attraction is the colour plates, which—I found out only recently—were produced for what is regarded as probably the first work on British spiders, which was by John Blackwall. They were produced for a supplement for that volume, but were never used and Bristowe managed to get hold of them. What is really remarkable is that they’re so accurate, these colour illustrations, that you can even identify things today from them—even though the names might have changed, as happens not only with spiders but other invertebrates. “I still remember October 2013. The papers were full of reports about false widow spiders. The Daily Star said 50 million of them were invading Britain. All this rubbish! ” In the body of this small book Bristowe also produces one or two nice little drawings. Here he’s talking about a little jumping spider called ‘bolas.’ It’s not known as bolas these days, but that was the name it had then. He talks about how “bolas adopts a nautical roll in order to display his magnificent calves. Or perhaps it would be more descriptive to say he lurches drunkenly from side to side.” And there is a nice little drawing which is subtitled “bolas indulging in a nautical roll.” From the description, you have a picture in your mind that he creates. Yes. He was one of the first people to actually describe how spiders lived, rather than just giving you a description of what they looked like. He developed that idea and spoke about what they got up to which, again, creates that interest, because there’s such a variety. Not all spiders work in the same way in the UK at all. Both A Book of Spiders and The World of Spiders , which came out in 1958 in the New Naturalist series, do that supremely well. No. I grew up in Lancashire. I moved down to Nottingham to go to college. I worked in a bookshop for a while and then started volunteering up at Sherwood Forest. It’s about 20 miles from Nottingham, but I used to go up there at weekends during the summer. I found out that they were looking for permanent staff. I asked the other staff what sort of questions they asked in the interview and was told that I needed to have a specialist interest in some aspect of natural history. I was already interested in birds and woodland, but I realised that nobody was doing anything on invertebrates. Particularly in an area of ancient oak woodland—with lots of dead wood lying around—nobody was doing anything on deadwood invertebrates at all. I went along to the interview, having had a quick look at a library book on deadwood insects and spiders, and got the job. The week after I started we read in the local paper that the Council had received a grant from the World Wildlife Fund of £100—which was quite a bit of money in those days—to carry out an arachnid survey at Sherwood Forest, and that ranger Lawrence Bee was going to be coordinating the survey on the ground. I was thrown in at the deep end. I spent the next few months just going out and collecting material and sending it off to be identified. I didn’t really know—apart from the fact that they were spiders—what I was collecting. Then the guy who was mentoring me from the [British Arachnological] Society recommended that I go away on a Field Studies Council course down at Flatford Mill for a week, which I did. By the end of that week, though it might take me all night to identify a spider, I knew the processes to go through. That started me off, and I’ve carried on doing it on my own, as a personal interest, ever since. I just find them fascinating. Under a microscope, they’re incredibly interesting to look at. You’ve got to have really quite high magnification. Even then, it’s sometimes difficult to pick out. There’s the complexity of the male palps, which is what you’ve got to look at to identify them. The picture we have on the front of our book is magnified 40 times through a microscope and it’s unbelievable. It just opens up a whole new world. That’s part of the interest, and then there’s the satisfaction of being able to identify something and say ‘That’s what it is.’ It’s something which has just grown with me over 40 years or so, I suppose."