The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition (Sibley Guides)

The finest book on all birds of USA

A masterful piece of work, with larger, clearer illustrations and many more species included. The revised layout makes the book a joy to use.

Everything that you read about this book on Amazon.uk is true. The book is amazing, is truly a bible for the birds of north America. But the dark colours ruined all the excellent artist job done by David Sibley. There is already a second printing available that, for what I read, resolved all the problems of the previous printing, but it's impossible to know which one you gonna get when you're ordering, if Amazon.uk doesn't a separation between the two printings... it's all a question of luck, on the end... Really bad job for the publisher... My advice: don't buy this book if you're not sure that is the second printing.

I have had the marvellous first edition of this book for over ten years, and I hastily bought this updated second edition as soon as it came out.But there are two problems with this new edition. These problems are not with what the author has produced, but with the printing. Firstly, the colours on some of the bird illustrations are too dark. Secondly, the print of much of the text is a sort of faint grey colour instead of black, and also rather small, making it difficult to read.There has been a lot of discussion about this on the American Amazon website (Amazon.com), and it seems there is the possibility of changes being made when a new print run is produced by the publishers.PS: September 2017: Now five stars if you get the right print run.Knopf have now produced a second and a third print run of this book, which have corrected the problems that I referred to above. I’ve just got myself a copy of the third print run, and this is now definitely the five star book that it should have been in the first place.But be careful – there are still copies of the faulty first print run on sale, and apparently Bloomsbury/Helm currently have no plans for producing a corrected print run of their edition of the book.So you need to be sure that you get the Knopf edition, and to be sure that you are getting a copy of the second or third print run. (The Natural History Book Service website actually allows you to choose between the corrected version and the original faulty one. The corrected version is more expensive, but well worth the extra money.)Phil Webster.