Hallucinogenic Plants by Richard Evans Schultes

Very fine copy in paper wraps, Golden Guide, 4”x5.5” fully illustrated in color, 160 pls., first printing of the 1976 first edition, a beautiful fine+ copy spine undamaged, no creasing, a tiny amount of edge wear at the front bottom about 1” noticeable in photo, an almost new copy of an important study of hallucinogenic plants and their religious, spiritual and cultural significance.

Around the same time Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in the early 1940s, a pioneering ethnobotanist, writer, and photographer named Richard Evan Schultes set out “on a mission to study how indigenous peoples” in the Amazon rainforest “used plants for medicinal, ritual and practical purposes,” as an extensive history of Schultes’ travels notes. “He went on to spend over a decade immersed in near-continuous fieldwork, collecting more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to science.”

“Described by Jonathan Kandell as “swashbuckling” in a 2001 New York Times obituary, Schultes was “the last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition.” Or so his student Wade Davis called him in his 1995 bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow. He was also “a pioneering conservationist,” writes Kandell, “who raised alarms in the 1960’s—long before environmentalism became a worldwide concern.” Schultes defied the stereotype of the colonial adventurer, once saying, “I do not believe in hostile Indians. All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness.”

A nontechnical examination of the physiological effects and cultural significance of hallucinogenic plants used in ancient and modern societies

$ 225.00