This is a review of two halves, because this is a publication that one can approach from two different directions. First, it is a Festschrift honouring the contributions made by Patricia Sims, a stalwart of the Natural History Museum in London since 1951 and a diatomist with a reputation both as a formidable scientist and as a warm individual. But, as a volume of the Beihefte zur Nova Hedwigia it occupies an uneasy borderland between a journal part and a ‘book’. Technically, Nova Hedwigia’s supplements are for monographs that are longer than a conventional paper, but the scope has expanded to include proceedings of symposia and Festchriften. As the recipients of Festschriften are often, by nature, curious individuals with wide-ranging interests, the result can be collections of papers united only by a professional link between author and subject. From the perspective of a reader who lacks this link, the result can be little different to just another journal part.

As a celebration of Patricia Sim's career, the editors have made a good job of pulling together a series of contributions that encapsulate her interests, leading with an annotated bibliography by David Williams and Grethe Hasle that lists the large number of new taxa that she described. This opening paper reminds us that Patricia Sims was part of the first generation of diatomists to recognise the value of scanning electron microscopy. That all but two of the other papers in this Festschrift make use of this instrument illustrates the impact that early pioneers such as her have made to the discipline. Three of the papers deal with Biddulphia and relatives, a group of genera of particular interest to Patricia Sims, and four of the others deal with the taxonomy and morphogenesis of marine diatoms generally. Four of the remaining papers concern freshwater diatoms; of these, David Mann's investigation of ‘unconventional diatom collections’, focusing on cytological preparations of Lothar Geitler, offers some fascinating perspectives, not just of meiosis and auxosporulation but also of the arrangement of species within epiphytic communities. Finally, Williams, Yesilyurt and Tuji provide a guide to the publications of the German phycologist Paul Friedrich Reinsch (1836–1914).

I suspect that the publisher's sales of this volume will be mostly to institutions that have a standing order to Beihefte zur Nova Hedwigia, and therefore it is a little invidious to ask whether this volume is worth 119 euros plus shipping costs. I expect that my experience of the volume will be typical of many: however interesting the papers in a volume such as this, only a few (three in my case) have any direct relevance to my work. As far as I can see, it is not possible to buy individual articles from this volume online, so anyone whose institution does not subscribe to the series will have to decide whether to buy the whole volume or to track down the articles via search engines. It took just a couple of minutes to find the first two papers I hunted for on ResearchGate, from where I could send reprint requests to the authors. I suspect that, with a little more effort, I could have tracked down most of the others too. That illustrates an unfortunate truth: the publishing model for volumes such as this has not kept pace with the realities of the 21st century. That is ironic, because a celebration of the career of a successful scientist is, in effect, recognition of someone who most definitely had kept pace with a changing world.