20 Profitable Books About Mushrooms

Mushrooms are not plants or animals. It’s part of a fungus, and fungi are their kingdom of life. They have high amounts of copper, and it’s in a plant-based form. It’s a type of copper needed in the vitamin C complex. So mushrooms are high in vitamin C, but especially the copper part of the vitamin C complex in nature. It’s helpful for the adrenal connective tissue joint health.

Mushroom is the only vegan source of vitamin D other than the sun. So it’s great with that and also has calcium to go with that. It’s loaded with B vitamins, essential for your skin, heart, mood, adrenals, stress, and a whole bunch of things. Also, the beta-glucan of mushrooms is good for insulin resistance and lowering cholesterol. You must read some amazing mushroom books to forage, grow, or cook mushrooms. Stay with me for the best recommendation.

20 Books About Mushrooms

Many books are available on mushrooms, but all are not evidence-based, or some have major errors. So, I consulted with a mushroom expert and learned some basic rules to identify the right one. I read 50+ books and only chose 2o books to suggest who want to know about them.

I’m going to list my favorite foraging books, a list of mushroom cultivation books, some medicinal mushroom books, and other fun and sci-fi books that have to do with mushrooms. So, I will talk 20 books about mushrooms to you. Let’s go!

Books For Mushroom Foraging:

• Mushrooms Demystified By David Arora
• National Audubon Society Field Guide To North American Mushrooms By National Audubon Society
• The Complete Mushroom Hunter By Gary Lincoff
• Mushrooms: River Cottage Handbook By John Wright

Books For Mushroom Growing:

• Growing Gourmet And Medicinal Mushrooms By Paul Stamets
• Mycelium Running By Paul Stamets
• DIY Mushroom Cultivation By Willoughby Arevalo
• Edible And Medicinal Mushrooms Technology And Applications By Diego Cunha Zied

Books For Medicinal Mushrooms:

• Medicinal Mushrooms By Martin Powell
• Healing Mushrooms By Tero Isokauppila
• The Fungal Pharmacy By Robert Rogers
• Medicinal Mushrooms By Georges M. Halpern
• The Mushroom Medicine Cabinet By Kris Rowsan
• Medicinal Mushrooms By Robert Rogers
• Fly Agaric By Kevin Feeney

Cookbook/Other Mushroom Books:

• The Mushroom Cookbook By Michael Hyams
• The Mushroom Fan Club By Elise Gravel
• Entangled Life By Merlin Sheldrake
• The Mushroom Magazine By Martin Powell

Science Fiction Mushroom Books:

• The Way Through the Woods By Long Litt Woon
• In Search of Mycotopia By Doug Bierend

1. Mushrooms Demystified

Mushrooms Demystified is one of my favorite mushroom books of all time. Although it’s not something you’ll take into the woods with you as you’re foraging, it’s an excellent reference to have at home. You can look up different mushrooms that you find in the woods. It’s got great dichotomous keys, meaning you can follow down by answering yes or no questions and find the species name for many mushrooms.

This book is quite outdated because it was published 30 years ago but still has a lot of relevant information. If you read this book from front to back, you will learn many about mushrooms. The great thing about David Aurora is his writing style makes a dry topic interesting. So this is a must-have on the bookshelf for any mushroom lover.

Author: David Arora
Publisher: Ten Speed Press (2nd Edition)
Tropes: Microbiology, Gardening, Nature, Food
Number Of Pages: 1056
Item Weight: 3.29 pounds
Dimensions: 6 x 2.1 x 9 inches
Available: Paperback | Hardcover

2. National Audubon Society Field Guide To North American Mushrooms

National Audubon Society Field Guide is the most popular and best-seller mushroom foraging book. As a small book, you could easily take it foraging with you. It’s also laid out all the mushrooms and easy to flip through. You can search for mushrooms based on their shape, color, and different things. Although this book is great and makes mushroom foraging accessible, it does have some downsides. First, every mushroom in this book is given a common name, and there are no dichotomous keys.

So you can get down to the species name quickly. Moreover, it’s a great reference, and it’s nice to have you in your pocket while you’re foraging around. It’s not the be-all-end-all for mushroom foraging books, but still, one that I highly recommend if you don’t have it.

Author: National Audubon Society
Publisher: Knopf, A Chanticleer Press
Tropes: Biology of Butterflies (Best Seller)
Number Of Pages: 928
Reading age: 12+ years
Available: Paperback | Hardcover

3. The Complete Mushroom Hunter: Illustrated Guide To Foraging, Harvesting, Enjoying Wild Mushrooms

The Complete Mushroom Hunter is a complete guide to foraging and harvesting. Author Gary Lincoff is famous in the world of mushrooms. So this is a good reference, especially for beginners. It goes through all the different mushroom types and talks about:

• The edible ones.
• The poisonous ones.
• Interesting species.
• Which ones are mycorrhizal?
• Which ones are sap or phytic?
• Where to find magical or psychedelic mushrooms?
• What to take with you when you go mushroom hunting.

The book is an excellent reference for people who don’t know anything about mushroom foraging. Also, it can teach people how to get comfortable with the idea of going out in the woods and starting to look for some of these mushrooms. The author gives lots of great pictures, and it’s accessible.

So it’s the perfect coffee table book. If you have no books on mushroom foraging and are getting into it, this book is an excellent place to start. Don’t pick any hardcover because it has major quality issues, but the paperback is good enough for font, color, cover, and binding style.

Author: Gary Lincoff
Publisher: Quarry Books (Revised & Illustrated Edition)
Tropes: Nature Reference, Nature Crafts, Environment History
Number Of Pages: 208
Available: Paperback | Kindle

4. Mushrooms: River Cottage Handbook

Mushrooms are specifically about foraging and how you can identify whether it’s 100% the right mushroom or not. It goes through many lookalikes and has recipes like making mushroom stock or preserving mushrooms. I’ve used this mainly to figure out where mushrooms I wanted to eat and which one is right or not poisonous.

So, for example, the velvet shank is one of those I love velvet, but I’m confident enough to identify them. It’s quite scary to find mushrooms. I recommend doing lots of research, and the book has lots of beautiful images of mushrooms, which is super fun.

Author: John Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (1st edition)
Tropes: Cooking, Herbs
Number Of Pages: 256
Available: Hardcover | Kindle

5. Growing Gourmet And Medicinal Mushrooms

Growing Gourmet And Medicinal Mushrooms is the most popular mushroom cultivation book I’ve had on the bookshelf since I started getting into this. There’s great information here, but this is another outdated book. If you’re getting into mushroom cultivation, this is the book where you want to start. The book goes through the different species you might be interested in cultivating. Also, it goes through the various parameters you’ll need to know to understand how to cultivate Mushrooms.

The author shows a lot about sterile techniques and how even to build mushroom farms. Overall, it’s a handy reference to have on the bookshelf. If you’re interested in growing mushrooms on a small scale, this book is probably too much because it goes in-depth into many different topics. But if you do want to dive deep and learn more about mushroom cultivation, read it.

Author: Paul Stamets
Publisher: Ten Speed Press (3rd Revised Edition)
Tropes: Landscape, Ecology, Garden Design, Health
Number Of Pages: 592
Dimensions: 7.49 x 1.35 x 8.99 inches
Available: Paperback | Kindle

6. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Mycelium Running is a good reference for people wanting to learn different permaculture techniques or learning about different ways mushrooms can be integrated into different farming techniques. The author describes many ways mushrooms can help save the world and micro remediation techniques.

So, it’s an exciting book for people who don’t want to grow mushrooms commercially or even on a small scale home but are interested in mushrooms in general. You can learn about nutritional properties, medicinal properties, inoculation methods, stump culture, log, and species selection for different environmental purposes.

Author: Paul Stamets
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Tropes: Pharmacies, Environmentalism, Horticulture, Ecology, Sustainability
Number Of Pages: 356
Available: Paperback | Spiral-bound | Kindle

7. DIY Mushroom Cultivation: Growing Mushrooms at Home for Food, Medicine, And Soil

DIY Mushroom Cultivation is for you if you want to grow mushrooms on a small scale at home. It covers many techniques you could do at home with very simple equipment. So if you want to start a large-scale farm, this is not the book for you. But it is a good reference if you want to learn how to grow mushrooms in a fruiting shotgun chamber or do a few projects on the side.

The author talks about techniques from growing mushrooms, using a kit to growing mushrooms, using pre-made spawn, and easy lab techniques you can use at home to manage cultures. Also, you can make your spawn, and the book is a great reference, especially for the beginner getting into mushroom cultivation.

Author: Willoughby Arevalo
Publisher: New Society
Tropes: Agriculture, Gardening
Number Of Pages: 208
Available: Paperback | Kindle

8. Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms: Technology And Applications

Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms are not for beginners and are not for the lighthearted. It is a textbook and could probably be used for a university course on commercial mushroom growing. The author goes in-depth into many different topics for commercial mushrooms like aggregates by spores and different species. It takes a broad scope and talks about how mushrooms are grown worldwide, the other techniques used to grow them, and the problems some of these mushroom growers might have.

So the book is comprehensive and also expensive. You must collect it if you are deeply interested in large-scale mushroom cultivation. But if you’re interested in that topic, it doesn’t get much better than this book.

Author: Arturo Pardo
Number Of Pages: 592
Available: eTextbook | Hardcover

9. Medicinal Mushrooms: A Clinical Guide

Medicinal Mushroom is a comprehensive guide to some of the world’s most well-researched and well-documented mushrooms. Martin is a genius when it comes to mushrooms and when it comes to explaining how mushrooms might be able to be used to benefit human health. His background is in biochemistry, but he’s also studied traditional Chinese medicine. So, combining these two practices gives Martin a thorough understanding of how mushrooms work.

The book, in particular, is intended for a clinical audience. For example, natural health care practitioners might want to prescribe mushrooms to their patients. But even for the non-clinical audience, it’s still a great book to have as a reference on your shelf. It starts by talking about:

• The mechanisms of action of mushrooms in the body in general.
• The 17 most commonly known mushrooms on a mushroom by mushroom basis.
• Different benefits and some of the different studies behind these mushrooms.

Martin directly references a lot of the research studies and then interprets them. So you can have a lot of actionable information. It’s not something you’d want to read through cover to cover, but it is a good reference that you’d want to have on the shelf. Many of the research studies and references used in this book are also on his website (mycologypress.com).

Author: Martin Powell
Publisher: Mycology Press
Tropes: Herbal Remedies
Number Of Pages: 152
Available: Paperback | Kindle

10. Healing Mushrooms: A Practical and Culinary Guide to Using Mushrooms for Whole Body Health

Healing Mushrooms is a medicinal mushroom book with a high-level overview of some of the most popular mushrooms, their benefits, and even how to use them. It’s very focused on what medicinal properties mushrooms have, and a lot of these you’ll be able to buy. Buying mushrooms or medicinal mushrooms are expensive, and it’s not very accessible. But I got this for an assignment, and it was helpful in that regard.

Tero is from Finland and has a deep knowledge of mushrooms from his upbringing. He is also the founder of Foresight Matic, well-known for its mushroom coffee and other mushroom-based drinks. So, it is an inspiration to learn about what type of mushrooms have, what type of medicinal properties, and what you can do with them.

The author goes over the ten main medicinal mushrooms, characteristics, and different compounds inside those mushrooms and explains how those compounds need to be extracted in different ways to make them more bioavailable. Also, he includes different recipes so you can get fancy and all the ways you incorporate medicinal mushrooms into your daily routine.

On a side note, Tero has also written a book called Santa Sold Shrooms, a children’s book that discusses the connection between Santa Claus and the Amanita muscaria mushroom. If you’re interested in the topic of medicinal mushrooms but don’t want to dive super deep, it is a good book for you.

Author: Tero Isokauppila
Publisher: Avery
Tropes: Vegetable Cooking, Nutrition, Science
Number Of Pages: 223
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Spiral-bound | Kindle | Audio CD

11. The Fungal Pharmacy: The Complete Guide To Medicinal Mushrooms And Lichens Of North America

The Fungal Pharmacy is a researchable guideline for folk medicine. Robert Rogers is from Alberta, so he gets extra points for that one. But he’s also super knowledgeable about medicinal plants and medicinal mushrooms. What’s different about this book is how much material is in it and how many mushrooms are covered. It covers over 300 species, which is incredible. The author also explains a lot of species that might not be commercially available and grow wild all over North America, specifically in the Pacific Northwest.

For each species, it covers the medicinal uses, how these mushrooms were traditionally prepared, and a lot of the in-depth research behind each species. Moreover, the book goes through the chemical constituents, the clinical studies, and the historical and current use of mushroom cultures worldwide. You don’t have to read the cover as a thick, comprehensive book. It’s a great reference that you can keep on the shelf and keep going back to every time you want to learn about a new species.

Author: Robert Rogers
Publisher: North Atlantic Books (1st Edition)
Tropes: Homeopathy, Drug Dependency, Folk-medicine, Mycology
Number Of Pages: 1248
Available: Paperback | Kindle

12. Medicinal Mushrooms: Ancient Remedies For Modern Ailments

Medicinal Mushrooms represent the ancient treatment process with modern knowledge. If you’re into medicinal mushrooms, you want to know what they’re good for, what research has been done on them, and how it’s been tested. It is very much about what research has been looking into as a scientific approach.

So this book is informational and fun, but not as fun as mushroom books with pictures. You can learn about the mushroom history, as well as their potential uses in the future. So if you’re interested in diving deep into the clinical side of mushrooms and how medicinal mushrooms can help people physiologically, this book is a necessary resource on your bookshelf.

Author: Georges M. Halpern
Publisher: M. Evans & Company
Tropes: Remedies, Botany
Number Of Pages: 186
Available: Paperback | Kindle

13. The Mushroom Medicine Cabinet: The 12 Most Powerful Medicinal Mushrooms

The Mushroom Medicine Cabinet makes all the information super digestible so you can learn about the high-level characteristics of some important mushrooms without getting too bogged down for each mushroom species. It covers what the mushroom looks like and where it can be found.

The author gives you a good idea of where to start and covers the benefits of the different mushrooms and what conditions those mushrooms might be able to help. Also, you get to know the history and research behind each of these individual mushrooms.

Author: Kris Rowsan
Publisher: Kris Rowsan Publishing
Tropes: Molecular Pharmacology, Neuropsychopharmacology, Drug Delivery Systems
Number Of Pages: 152
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Kindle

14. Medicinal Mushrooms: The Human Clinical Trials

In Medicinal Mushrooms Human Clinical Trials, Robert Rogers goes in-depth into each medicinal mushroom and specifically highlights some of the most promising results from the trials. Luckily for medicinal mushrooms, a lot of research has been done. So this book covers:

• 50 different species and 500 different studies.
• 100 plus human clinical trials.
• The topics of the setting of microdosing and the importance of music for psilocybin therapy.

A lot of these studies are double-blind. In the placebo-controlled studies, which is the gold standard in mushrooms. When you think about it, many studies have been done in vitro or on a petri dish. So going over the human clinical trials and the double-blind placebo-controlled trials have some of the most important results. That is what I appreciate about it. Robert also wrote a book called Psilocybin Mushrooms, which covers the increasingly important topic of psilocybin mushrooms and how they might be able to be used for mental health, and so much more.

Author: Robert Rogers
Publisher: Prairie Deva Press
Tropes: Alternative Therapies, Medicine
Number Of Pages: 158
Available: Paperback | Kindle

15. Fly Agaric: A Compendium of History, Pharmacology, Mythology, & Exploration

Fly Agaric covers everything from the identification of all different species of Amanita. Also, it shows many compounds and their concentration inside those mushrooms. You can see the effect that those compounds might have on our minds.

The author covers many of this mushroom’s unique and interesting history and cultural importance. There’s so much to learn about mushrooms in general. So if you’re interested in this topic, I can’t think of a better place to start than Fly Agaric.

Author: Kevin M Feeney
Publisher: Fly Agaric Press
Tropes: Religion & Spirituality, Ancient Civilizations
Number Of Pages: 508
Available: Paperback | Hardcover

16. The Mushroom Cookbook: A Guide to Edible Wild, Cultivated Mushrooms And Recipes

The Mushroom Cookbook is a great reference to figure out different ways to use these unique and exciting mushrooms. There’s a lot of information out there on how to cook mushrooms. If you get some more unique mushrooms or wild ones, what will you do with them?

The Mushroom Cookbook has many different ideas and recipes you can use and find ways to get these mushrooms into your life deliciously. So if you’re looking for different ways to use some of the unique and delicious mushrooms, the book is a good reference.

Author: Michael Hyams
Publisher: Lorenz Books
Tropes: Cooking, Culture
Number Of Pages: 256
Available: Hardcover

17. The Mushroom Fan Club

The Mushroom Fan Club is a comic book showing the mushroom details with pictures. We live in a culture of micro phobia, and many kids will grow up thinking that mushrooms are dangerous and should be avoided. But this book is a great way to teach kids about all the different types of mushrooms you can find in the forest. Although it isn’t an excellent reference for identification, it does go through many fun ways to teach kids about the different types of mushrooms and some of their characteristics.

So it’s a fun reference for kids to get an idea and spark some interest in the different mushrooms they can find in the woods. If you have kids or somebody younger, you can get them to get people interested in mushrooms.

Author: Elise Gravel
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly (Illustrated Edition)
Tropes: Drawn & Quarterly Comic, Ecology
Number Of Pages: 44
Available: Hardcover | Kindle

18. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Entangled Life is best for you if you want to know general cool stuff about fungi, what they are, and what they can do. It covers most things very broadly but also does go in-depth. I feel like I’m doing a mushroom pep talk with this book. The author shows you how essential fungi are and gives insight into this book’s beautiful contents.

Author: Merlin Sheldrake
Publisher: Random House
Tropes: Environmental Science, Botany, Natural History
Number Of Pages: 370
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Spiral-bound

19. The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning

The Way Through The Woods was published in 2019 by SPIEGEL and Growl, which at the time was an imprint of Random House, but they have since relaunched as an independent publisher. It was translated from Norwegian by Barbara Jay Haviland, and the hardcover of this book that I got comes in at 291 pages. This is a memoir in which the author discusses how the author lost her husband very suddenly and unexpectedly. They had been a couple for a long time, and they met when they were very young.

The author was in her late teens, and her husband was in his early twenties. So they had spent a good chunk of their lives together as a couple. One day when her husband went to work, he collapsed and died. Then all of a sudden, the author, who had spent most of her life with this person who moved to Norway to be with her husband, found herself alone. This memoir does more or less start at that point in her life.

We do learn about the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death. But the point where her story begins is after her husband has died, and she’s trying to figure out what she wants to do next. She’s wondering if she wants to stay in Norway because she’s a Malaysian woman. Then she decided she wanted to take a mushrooming course where she would learn from experts how to identify different types of mushrooms and go out into nature as a group and collect them.

The author of this book does keep the science pretty light, and she focuses much more on practical information when it comes to mushroom gathering and when it comes to her journey. So, it is fun seeing this author go from this beginner who’s skeptical that she will be able to learn how to identify even a handful of species. You see her get more and more into it, up to the point where she’s studying to become a certified mushroom identifier. It was beautifully written and translated, a great introduction to mushrooms for beginners, and great motivation to move on.

Author: Litt Woon Long
Publisher: Random House
Tropes: Biography Memoir, Death, Arc
Number Of Pages: 290
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle

20. In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, And the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms

In Search of Mycotopia was published in 2021 by Chelsea Green, an independent publisher. The hardcover of this book comes in at 336 pages. It is a collection of profiles about people working with mushrooms in different capacities. At the beginning of the book, when the author speaks about the scientists who study mushrooms, he’s also discussing the science of mushrooms. It goes way more in-depth than on the way through the woods.

Given their science, mushrooms are a potent symbol of community and networking. Since a passion for this field does seem to bring people together, the individuals that the author spoke with for this book and people he met when he was attending different gatherings that he attended for research. There’s this idea that people can use mushrooms to change the world. So there was a ton of cool science in the book’s first half, and I can see how people recognize the amazing potential of mushrooms to foster community and social progress.

Author: Doug Bierend
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Tropes: Environment, Plants, Activism
Number Of Pages: 322
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle

Bonus Book: The Mushroom Magazine

The Mushroom Magazine is a beautifully designed magazine that covers all different topics, and it’s a nice piece to have on your coffee table. There are only two issues so far. But they cover topics from producing music and using pink oysters as a synthesizer to traveling adventures throughout the mushroom world. You can check this out at the Mushroom Pub.

If you have any questions, put them down in the comment box, and I’ll do my best to answer them. If you have more book recommendations, I’d love to hear about them.

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