Hi Bob,

maybe you know just my name. I also want to make landshells better known and so I am
donating to the COA this year some Austrians and Italian landshells as a donation to the
auction. The European landshells are mainly less colored than the exotic species, but
also very nice and interesting, and specially I like micro ones. To see some landshells
from Tyrool, please visit my homepage. www.netwing.at/nisters
If you are interested in some species from the Tyrol and after summer please let me know.
I can send you nice species, from 1 - 30 mm from Austria and Italy. I would be pleased
if you can give me landshells from your zone or sea shells for the museum in Innsbruck,
if you can spare some species. Pleas send me your private e-mail for furhter contacts.
with best shelling greetings
Helmut from Innsbruck

Helmut "Helix" Nisters
Franz-Fischer-Str. 46
A-6020 Innsbruck / Austria / Innsbruck
phone and fax: 0043 / 512 / 57 32 14
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
web:    www.netwing.at/nisters/
           (please visit it and sign guestbook)

office:
Natural History Department of the
Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum Innsbruck
Feldstrasse 11 a
A-6020 Innsbruck / Austria / Europe
phone: 0043 / 512 / 58 72 86 - 37

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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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WEBSITE:         http://www.univershell.com

CONTACT:      [log in to unmask]