Svenska Spindlar

The book Svenska Spindlar or Aranei Svecici (Swedish and Latin, respectively, for "Swedish spiders") is one of the major works of the Swedish arachnologist and entomologist Carl Alexander Clerck and was first published in Stockholm in the year 1757. It was the first comprehensive book on the spiders of Sweden and one of the first regional monographs of a group of animals worldwide. The full title of the work is Svenska Spindlar uti sina hufvud-slägter indelte samt under några och sextio särskildte arter beskrefne och med illuminerade figurer uplyste – Aranei Svecici, descriptionibus et figuris æneis illustrati, ad genera subalterna redacti, speciebus ultra LX determinati,^[1] ("Swedish spiders into their main genera separated, and as sixty and a few particular species described and with illuminated figures illustrated") and included 162 pages of text (eight pages were unpaginated) and six colour plates. It was published in Swedish, with a Latin translation printed in a slightly smaller font below the Swedish text.

Clerck described in detail 67 species of Swedish spiders,^[2] and for the first time in a zoological work consistently applied binomial nomenclature as proposed by Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus had originally invented this system for botanical names in his 1753 work Species Plantarum, and presented it again in 1758 in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae for more than 4,000 animal species. Svenska Spindlar is the only pre-Linnaean source to be recognised as a taxonomic authority for such names.