Jim,
I share your disdain for those who know and believe ONLY what is in the books. Granted the books are a great place to build a corpus of knowledge, but authors are human. And, it should be noted, perhaps that the works that we refer to so often are almost exclusively collaborative efforts with many people contributing photos and data points. Statistically, the probability for error is pretty high; we should be glad that most books have an accuracy rate that is in the high 90%.
Having said that, errors do creep in and there is simply no substitute for hands on examination and long, sometimes painful talks and correspondence with the greybeards. The older guys have forgotten more than many newbies will ever learn and were able to learn much when the price of an error was not the cost of a medium priced automobile.
My zwei pfennigs
Tom A.
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