Four series, one editorial rule.
A title belongs to a series because of how it will be used, not because of what it describes. The series decides the format, the type size and the binding; the subject only decides the contents.
Riverbank
The founding series, and the one that set the format. Freshwater margins are a good subject for a bounded book because the habitat is linear: you walk along it, and the same forty or fifty organisms recur. Volumes cover sedges and rushes, bankside willows, adult caddis and mayfly, wet-silt tracks, riverine mosses, and one odd volume on the wrack lines left by winter floods.
The keys in this series are strictly dichotomous and never exceed eleven steps. Where a genuine determination requires a microscope we say so and stop, rather than offering a field character that only works half the time. Readers have thanked us for this more often than for anything else we do.
Nightwork
Designed against a red torch. Colour is used only where it survives filtered light, so the plates lean on outline, posture and relative proportion. Type is set two points larger than house standard and the page is more open, because a book read at two in the morning is read badly.
The three volumes are moths at light, calling amphibians, and the winter sky. The last of these assumes no equipment: no binoculars, no app, no red-dot finder. It has been criticised for that and we have not changed it.
Hedgerow & Verge
The smallest format we print, on the theory that the habitat is the one you cross without planning to. Contents are ordinary on purpose: the grasses of a mown strip, the first twenty umbellifers, gall formations on common shrubs, and a volume on woody stems in winter that is nothing but bark, bud and scar.
This series carries the shortest entries in the house — sixty words and one plate — and the longest back matter, because verge species change fast and readers keep records.
Coast Margin
Newest and slowest. The published volume treats strandline material: egg cases, holdfasts, worn shell, and the manufactured debris that is now unavoidably part of the assemblage. The two in preparation cover saltmarsh zonation and rocky-shore algae; the second has been in proof for three years because the artist and the editor disagree about how much a drawing may tidy.