A Wonderful Letter from Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, Associate Department Head of Geography at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Graham and Jeff,

I just wanted to alert you that the books arrived yesterday afternoon and I’ve spent this morning already placing the books donated to geography on the bookshelves in our conference room! Once I started unpacking the boxes, I couldn’t put the damned books down after I started reading them. They are truly fascinating, Graham! Some books are very large so I had to be creative in my positioning of them in the bookshelf!

But then I got to the box with the two volumes on conifers, and in all my years as a tree “expert,” I’ve never seen anything like them. For over 30 years, I’ve been collecting reference books about trees, but these two volumes are in a class by themselves. It has conifer genera listed and described that I’ve never even heard of before! It has range maps, Latin binomials (with authors) and synonymy, photos of cones, needles, bark, trees, and habitats, over 3,700 total color photos, and detailed descriptions on every damned conifer out there, all across over 1,000 pages of text. What an amazing work. And it included an ex libris plate signed by the authors! Thank you!

Graham, I can’t thank you enough! Literally, I cannot find words to express my thanks for the conifer books and our thanks as a geography department for the reference collection about maps.

Best,

Dr. Henri D. Grissino-Mayer

Associate Department Head

Department of Geography

1000 Philip Fulmer Way

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0925 USA