WE all are. WE can hardly get enough of the knowledge.
When I first learned about shrooms, after picking libs for a year, and then a few baeos in Oregon, I moved here in the early 1970s to Seattle.
My first summer was spent in Volunteer Park with my first son.
I was sitting on the lawn of the park in front of the art Museum, playing my guitar and smoking a doobie.
It was on July fourth and hot. And I was thinking to myself, who can I get to take me out to a pasture in the fall to pick libs.
When I looked down at the surrounding ground around me I noticed what later I learned were blue ringers, Psilocybe stuntzii.
They looked a little like miniture cubes because of the ring on the stem and they blued in the caps, sometimes a greenish tinge on the edge and bluing in the stems at time depending in where they were in their growth and developments.
By then, Leonard Enos shroom guide was sold out and there was the mimeographed book by Ed. Kardel of Eugene, using images he redrew from Singer and Smith's 1959 monograph on Psilocybe inthe PNW. There was little literature and so I went to Daniel Stuntz at the U of W with my find. He told me they were all over campus in the woodchips as well as on the lawns. He told me of the Wasson Life Magazine article and then identified my blue ringers as Psilocyeb cyanescens (a mistake which could have cost me dearly). Why? Because in my book, I gave a dosage at 20-40 mushrooms for the P. cyanescens ID page. Good thing no one ate that many real P. cyanecens. IT was corrected in a later 1983 edition as P. stuntzii after the paper was published naming the species for Stuntz
I was interested in learning about them. Why they made me feel good, why they made me happy and euphoric And sexual, and what did they do to my brain to make me feel that so happy, always laughing and dancing.
From the Wasson article I learned of Andy Weil and of Tim Leary's shroom experiences and research and of the Wasson bibliography described by Ott in the note below. I went through several hundred articles because at that time there were only about 360 known papers and books on magic shrooms. Only about three or four identification guides.
I also learned that many articles were missing pictures or whole articles which were excised from the journals and books they were in..
Someone even stole all of the images from the Life magazine article of Wasson's discoveries at the U of W.
So public information was rare and scarce.
One nice thing about the PNW. I heard Jonathan Ott one day on a radio show here in Seattle.
Then one day i walked into the Magus Bookstore in the U district and met a young David Tatelman (David operates his business as a distributor od subculture books and underground comix ass well as being the first to distribute High Times and Rolling Stone int he PNW and is the man who brought us Paul Stamets first bookm, a book for which I sold the first 100 copies at a smanisitic conference in SF in 1978).
David told me he was interested in publishing a book on mushrooms and would I like to be part of that book.
I said yes and he gave me his card and then I lost it.
So several months later, not knowing how to find david, He owned the then American Dream Head Shop on University Way and 55th.
So while I was going to school, David got a professor friend of Richard Alan Miller's from the UW to loan him the UW collection of Psilocybe images. He kept them for several years until I convinced him to return them.
While I was going to graphic Arts classes, I wrote, designed and laid out the pages for Magic Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest. I also did the offset photography, borrowed some images, developed the positives and then burnt the plates. I asked the President of the Institution I was going to school at that if I paid for my own paper, could I print up as many books as I wanted to. He said yes. So I actually bought large l paper, cut it at school and printed the book myself and then collated each copy by hand and stapled it three times each.
Our final project at the school was to take six pages and print a book with them and make a heavier cover for the book and print 20 copies.
I got smart and folded the pages in half (turning six pages into 24) and bought paper and used a heavier stock for a cover and printed the first edition of Magic Mushrooms of the PNW. 2,000 copies priced at $3.50 a book.
The money from that paid for more paper and I printed it myself, on an AB Dick offset press, 53,000 copies of the book for the 2nd edition and lowered the price to $2.50 a copy with 16 species described and a dozen cool photos.
According to David, who distributed my book, my book out sold his professionally printed "Magikal Mushroom Handbook" which had two different editions. He also misidentified a few species in his book. In the first edition of his guide he had my photo of Conocybe cyanopus. Unfortunately he printed it in Black and white and the color copy was lost to history.
However, to get back to Workmans glee at finding new articles and information, I began to save every daily newspaper article on shrooms. Also, the PNW radio stations always announced the beginning of Magic Mushroom season from Bandon Oregon to B.C., Canada.
And as I noted there were only about 360 or so known papers on the shrooms. I soon read many of them and collected the reference data for these publications.
Here is what Ott wrote in 2001 about my bibliography and the rapid growth of known articles between 1955 and 2000.
When I first published this cd-rom in 2001, there were only 1700 references and 5,000 cross references and 900 annotations(this does not count the Amanita bibliography.
From Jonathan Ott,
Quote:
By 1962, the explosion in scientific research consequent to these breakthroughs inspired R. G. Wasson to compile a guide to that literature, The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico and Psilocybine: A Bibliography, published in Harvard University's Botanical Museum Leaflets [20(2):25-73]. This first printing of Wasson's bibliography contained 376 references, and six months later, a corrected second printing [20(2a):25-73c] was expanded by addenda to a total of 399 citations. Although this scientific flood was stemmed immeasurably by the subsequent illegalization of LSD and psilocybine as the 1960's drew to a close, such research continued once scientists from the generation which came of age during the `psychedelic sixties' embarked on their careers--we who had cut our psychonautic teeth on black-market LSD, the production of which vastly swamped the paltry output of the two pharmaceutical firms which had manufactured it prior to prohibition. By the end of the next decade, counterculture publications had rendered routine the identification of wild psilocybian mushrooms--which were found to be growing all over the world--as well as their facile cultivation for black-market sale. Today aficionados on every continent avidly collect the entheogenic bounty of nature, while cultivated psilocybin mushrooms are as commonplace as black-market commodities in the United States and Europe. Moreover, despite preposterous bureaucratic obstacles in its way, limited investigation of psilocybine, LSD and other entheogens continues in University laboratories, especially in Europe, not to mention in `underground' psychotherapy, particularly in the United States. Finally, some pharmaceuticals, such as Sandoz' [now Novartis Pharma] Visken (Registered trade-mark) or pindolo [Merck Index 12:7597]--which are derivatives of psilocine/psilocybine—have found widespread application in modern medicine.
When Gordon Wasson summarized his decade of `ethnomycological' research in Mesoamerica in 1980 [The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica, Mcgraw-Hill, New York], his bibliography [here limited to historical and ethnographic aspects] ran to 168 items, whereas a multidisciplinary book on the mushrooms in 1978 [Teonanácatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America, Madrona Press, Seattle, Wa.], to which Wasson, Hofmann, Richard Evans Schultes and others contributed, featured 219 bibliographic citations. In 1983, Mexican mycologist Gastón Guzmán, inspired by the Wasson research to enter his field, published a world monograph of the genus Psilocybe, to which belong the bulk of the psilocybian mushrooms [The Genus Psilocybe, J. Cramer, Vaduz, Germany], with a mycological bibliography of 464 sources. Italian Francisco Festi's 1985 review of the subject [Funghi Allucinogeni, Musei Civici di Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy], was supported by 330 references. The present decade saw the appearance of four important books on our fungal entheogen: the first user-oriented European book on psychotropic mushrooms by Jochen Gartz in 1993, with 224 citations [Narrenschämme: Psychotrope Pilze in Europe, Editions Heuwinkel, Neu-A;schwil, Switzerland]; the most comprehensive and international `field guide' to psilocybian mushrooms, with more than 100 color mushroom photographs, published in 1996 by Paul Stamets, replete with 169 references [Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, Ten Speed Press, San Francisco, Ca.]; that same year saw the publication of a book edited by Roger Liggenstorfer and Christian Rätsch [María Sabina: Botin der Heiligen Pilze, Nachtschatten Verlag, Solothurn, Switzerland and Medienexperimente, Löhrbach, Germany], which had one of the largest bibliographies to the subject, with 499 entries; finally my 1993 overview of phytoentheogens [Pharmacotheon, Natural Products Co, Kennewick, Wa.], revised in 1996, had some 600 references on the psilocybian mushrooms, out of a total of more than 2500.
It is my pleasure to introduce the reader to Teonanácatl: A Bibliography of Entheogenic Fungi, by John W. Allen and Jochen Gartz. Non-scholars little appreciate the value of a comprehensive bibliography to enable students and researchers rapidly to penetrate to the very frontiers of knowledge, hence to know what the outstanding problems might be, and to avoid tediously reinventing the wheel. The sheer size of this bibliography, at some 2800 references being 4-5 times larger than any predecessor and fully seven-fold larger than Wasson's pioneering effort 43 years ago, is eloquent testimony to its need and value. Allen and Gartz are to be commended for this invaluable service to ethnomycologists the world over.
Jonathan Ott
Natural Products Co.
10 May 1998.
Additional changes of References in volume by
John W. Allen (May 2007).
I updated the amount of references of the Ott's 2500 a few years ago fromthe original manuscript when he wrote the forward tot he book and I am working this out at home every day putting more and more data as I gather it. You can see now the amount of literature on these shrooms.
I have read the majority, except many in other languages I do not speak.
So I can understand Workman when he refers to himself as a shroom geek.
If anyone here is the most studious studier of shroomology (ethnomycology), then they too need to read it all.
Hm. I just coined a new phrase, 'shroomolgy.'
Remember me for that along with 'psilophoria', a term regarding the physical effects of a psilocybian intoxication.
mj
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