However, there's at least one small, commonly available field guide illustrating and describing the most common spider species, many of them the very ones found in our backyards. It's one of the Golden Nature Guides, almost always available in mall bookstores, called Spiders and Their Kin , by Herbert and Lorna Levi, and published by Golden Press of New York. There could hardly be a better first introduction to spiders than this. This series is published by Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers of Dubuque, Iowa. Once you begin looking closely at spiders, one of the most exciting of your first discoveries will be that many, maybe most, are extraordinarily pretty.
Many spiders are brightly colored, and some are even shaped like psychedelic witch-doctor masks.
Spider bodies are fundamentally different from those of insects. Spiders possess eight legs , in contrast to insects, who possess only six. Also, many insects have compound eyes consisting of perhaps hundreds of small eyes, but nearly all spiders just have eight eyes . At the spider's rear end there are tiny spigot-like projections called spinnerets , from which spider silk is extruded. There's a rainbow of ways that male spiders meet females.