IvoKo: Books about carnivorous plants

About me

I got fascinated by carnivorous plants as a child when my brother gave me the first three plants as a birthday present, not knowing what it will cause. The first carnivorous plant book I have ever seen was a title "Masožravé rostliny" (1984) by Dr. Miloslav Studnička. I have been growing CPs for a couple of years at time when it was released. The book was so great that I retyped its entire contents word by word on our typewriter. I must confess I cannot recall why I simply did not buy it. This was my first source of CP literature.

It was in 1992 or 1993 when I started wondering if there does not exist a list of CP literature. I asked my friends through the internet and one of them, Barry Meyers-Rice, simply answered "And why don't you simply start working on it?". That was the main impulse which led to many, many days spent over the years searching for information on every publication on carnivorous plants. The first version appeared in 1996.

I became an active member of a Czech CP society called Darwiniana and because CP literature was hard to obtain in our country, I started organizing group orders of CP books. People who ever tried something like this can tell it is an ungrateful role. I found simply much easier to buy more copies of the titles I came across when searching for information for my CP book list. And then I offered these spare copies to others. As my 'hunting' skills developed, the CP book list as well as my own library grew bigger and bigger. Despite the fact there was my email written in the list, there were just a few people who were so kind and contributed ("With a little help from my friends", thank you!).

But this all meant I needed to spend more and more time keeping the list updated. Moreover, I was aware that a pure plain text was not what you would expect in the 21st century. It was around 2012 when my family and work finally conquered and I more or less stopped working on the list. My fascination by CP books however remain and that is why I decided to build this website. The CP book list presented here is the version that does not include all books I know of because a simple text list cannot properly use non-English characters, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Thai.

Ivo Koudela

About website and logo

IvoKo is an acronym of my name, Ivo Koudela. Moreover, if written like this "i v oko", it means a letter 'i' in eye in Czech and that's the reason for the website logo .

All books being offered here are just spare copies of titles which I have on stock. Some books are very rare and that is why there is just a single copy available. Note, I handle everything in my spare time but I try to reply to any message as soon as possible.

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