I know someone who has 2 NOS (never opened) copies (4 actually, but wants
to sell 2 now) of Powell's 1979 "New Zealand Mollusca" and has fallen on
hard times. He wants $500US each! Now to a mollusc freak that's horrendous,
and I wouldn't consider paying that. But he wants to try the antiquarian
market. However if anybody knows anyone who's willing to pay THAT MUCH for
an unopened copy, let me know; I'm acting on his behalf (no, the copies are
NOT mine). I will be unsurprised if there are no bites. However, as I've
said before, I have been unable to raise a copy in a year of advertising...

And it's such an awful book! The plates are inserted around the page
bundles and you're always flipping back and forth to find the right one.
The photos, many deriving from Powell's original descriptions, often date
from the fifties. The painted ones are utterly unrecognizable. Clusters of
drawings, again often from the 50s, are scattered among the text, usually
needlessly far from the description. The taxonomy is awful and though it
was supposed to be comprehensive, it fell far short of that goal. Some
corrections hide on several pages near the back of the book; it was many
years after buying the book that I discovered them! The species
distributions are often far wider than Powell claims. My working copy is
full of pencil annotations, added spp etc and I've had the book stripped
and the plates collected near the back, along with 22 extra plates made
from the drawings via copier and Macintosh! MUCH better. As a major worker
here says, Powell sat in an armchair with drawers of specimens from only a
few localities per species available. He had no idea of known species'
distributions or of how many new species there were still to discover; at
present there are over 1500 known undescribed species, barring many of
those in my collection, and I'd bet probably that many again waiting on the
seafloor. Bruce is busy putting large dents in the "Recent undescribed"
list!

Regarding extremely rare shells, I must agree with Guido Poppe. There are
lots of new species out there waiting to be found, and he who finds the
first specimen of one has a specimen of the first-equal rarest species. Any
species will be extremely rare when first discovered, no matter that there
mat be millions of specimens down there. I'm lucky in that I am able to
partake of canyon dredging off the SE corner of New Zealand, where nobody
else interested in shells has access, and there are lots of newbies there,
so naturally I get hold of them. My Recent and fossil collections have
dozens of species known only from my cabinets, as NZ workers Phil Maxwell
and Bruce Marshall are well aware; they are available for study and
occasionally are borrowed; several specimens collected by me, mainly
fossils, are now holotypes.
Lots of new rare species (and genera) simply means lots of unique or
near-unique specimens. Most of these are of course "micros", as the vast
majority of molluscs are small.

Andrew