A little outdated but useful for the discussion of what was called ‘Omnispective taxonomy’, an attempt to be wholly empirical. The book’s merits are in the critique of the then prevailing views of Mayr. ‘The Omnispective System … [is the] modern form of classical taxonomy, [and] has been in use for two hundred years and has produced 99% of the revisionary and monographic work in taxonomy’ (Blackwelder, RE. 1977. Twenty five years of taxonomy. Systematic Zoology 26: 107–137).

While focusing on Charles Davies Sherborn (1861–1942), ‘The papers in this volume fall into three general areas. In the first section, seven papers present different facets of Sherborn as a man, scientist and bibliographer, and describe the historical context for taxonomic indexing from the 19th century to today. In the second section, five papers (with a major appendix) discuss current tools and innovations for bringing legacy information into the modern age. The final section, with three papers, tackles the future of biological nomenclature, including innovative publishing models and the changing tools and sociology needed for communicating taxonomy’.

Polaszek, Watson et al. and Wheeler are all useful collections of papers on various aspects of the taxonomic enterprise, although, as we noted above, not much space is devoted to how taxonomy is actually done.

A useful book focused on the practice of species-level taxonomy.