Dear Ross et al:

I must agree! We have over 700,000 shells in our inventory and I am
consistently drawn to the land shells. They are everywhere here in Florida.
Just after a rain my kids can easily collect a paper cup full of micro land
shells just in the front yard! We have seen so many different and beautiful
specimens from the US - look at the Liguus! I figure it has to do with three
factors:

1]  Lack of ID books - I have 4 different books 2 by Walter Freeman Webb,
the Compendium [of course] and a book by Powell on New Zealand Shells that
has a lot of land snails mentioned but other resources are hard to find.

2] Name a real famous Land Shell collector [other than Archie
Jones/Humes/Winte/Von Paulsen/E J Power]? I could name 20 famous sea shell
collectors, perhaps we need to elevate some collector to "super hero status"
and let that person lead the way.

3] Perhaps the main reason is self collecting land snails is highly
unattractive work. You don't get to go to the beautiful ocean, instead you
have to muck about in a swamp/forest/cliff environment under the hot sun.
Land snail collectors are more like Victorian era African explorers, than
family vacationers who charter a boat and find their treasures.

Perhaps, Art Weil could write us poor land shell collectors a book in the
same format as "Shell Shocked" - he could even called it "Land Locked"! This
might help us as we seek to convert salt shell lovers over to the Dark Side
of the Force!

I hope that there are a lot more land shell collectors out there, and that
they start to emerge.

Bob


Bob & Rosemary

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The UniverShell Trading Company
4185 West Lake Mary Boulevard
PMB174
Lake Mary, Florida 32746
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