A nineteenth-century collection of the Large Blue (Maculinea arion), which became extinct in Britain in the late 1970s, one of the many fine illustrations of butterflies and those who studied them in The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors (by Michael Salmon, Harley Books: 2000, £30.00). The story of the Large Blue well illustrates the mania that gripped some nineteenth-century collectors, with the taking of “more than 2,660 specimens” of this rare butterfly at a Cornish site in 1896. Most of the entomologist-collectors described by Salmon were fortunately less acquisitive and laid the foundations of our present knowledge of butterfly biology and ecology. This information-packed but highly readable account of 300 years of British lepidoptery, practised largely by amateurs, is a must-read for butterfly afficionados and social historians alike.

The amateur tradition continues, and records collected by thousands of volunteers between 1995 and 1999 provided the data for The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland (edited by Jim Asher et al., Oxford University Press: 2001. £30.00, $40.00). This handsomely produced book records the most comprehensive survey of butterflies ever undertaken in Britain and Ireland, and provides an invaluable picture of the state of all the native species, now under threat from habitat destruction if no longer from the killing bottle and collecting box. Happily, the Large Blue figures in this book as well, having been reintroduced to managed sites in the 1980s and 1990s.