Two New Corn Snake Manuals by Jonathan Crowe
The OHS News 85 (Spring 2000)

The Corn Snake Manual
by Bill Love and Kathy Love
Advanced Vivarium Systems, 2000. Paperback, 128 pp. ISBN 1-88277054-4

Corn Snakes
by R. D. Bartlett and Patricia Bartlett
Barron’s, 1999. Paperback, 48 pp. ISBN 0-7641-1120-5

Corn snakes, for snakes that are comparatively easy to keep — corn snakes are to herpetoculture what boiling water is to cooking: screw that up and you probably shouldn’t try anything else — are a lot more complicated than they used to be. In 1991, Michael J. McEachern’s Color Guide to Corn Snakes described a handful of single- and double-recessive mutations and a couple of distinctive locality morphs. Now there are more morphs than I myself can keep track of, and it’s kind of hard to figure out what they all are.

Fortunately, we now have, after some delay, The Corn Snake Manual, by Bill and Kathy Love. Intended as a successor to McEachern’s Color Guide and Keeping and Breeding Corn Snakes, the Loves’ book is easily the best and most comprehensive care guide on the shelves (though the two by McEachern are still worth getting if you can still find them.) Each section covers its subject with an amazing thoroughness: a lengthy treatise on brumation; a thoughtful couple of pages on stress; even a serious investigation of commercial snake sausages (ick!) under feeding. That thoroughness also carries over to the lavishly illustrated section covering colour and pattern morphs: we not only get a picture and a brief description, but also the history of how that given morph came about (and by whom). So now I discover that a pewter is a combination of bloodred and charcoal (anerythristic B), that butter is an amelanistic caramel, that a milk snake phase is a selectively bred Miami phase… . With so much useful and interesting information in this book, every hobbyist with corn snakes simply has to have it.

But for someone just starting out, particularly if he or she is younger, I might suggest that he or she start with the Bartletts’ (them again!) short book, Corn Snakes. It’s short and to the point, covers all the necessary information in only 48 pages, and is well and clearly laid out. For beginners, The Corn Snake Manual might be like an oversize mouse to a young corn snake — nutritious, eagerly attacked, but a bit too much to digest all at once.

Note: This article has not been updated since its first publication. As a result, some of the facts referred to in the text may now be out of date.