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I chose this copy of The Fishing Tourist for rebinding as the text block was generally clean but the binding had suffered serious damage. When I received the rebound book from Debra Frances, I was delighted to find a portion of the original…

I believe that engaging with the larger community of book artists and craftspeople is an important—and arguably essential—part of being a book collector. I enjoy occasionally commissioning custom bindings for my books. This copy of Hallock’s…

The “Fishes” section of Shaw’s General Zoology includes four volumes, each with an engraved title page adorned with a vignette of a fish in an ocean scene. In my hand-coloured copy of this title, all four vignettes have also been hand coloured.

Shaw’s General Zoology was a popular natural history compendium published in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The “Fishes” volumes of Shaw’s Zoology are often found on the market today; however, this is the first (and only!) copy…

This page shows young Elsje exploring the ocean in her new piscine form, naively unaware of the dangers that await her in the background.

I enjoy adding these sorts of books to the social history portion of my collection. Many nineteenth-century children’s stories feature fish (or children who transform into fish) that stray from the safety of their homes and parents. Some children,…

The lovely front wrapper of Elsje bij de Visschen was protected for over 100 years by the custom dust jacket created for the book not long after it was published.

Children’s books are a fascinating genre to collect, as these books were often heavily used and thus show evidence of how previous owners cared for their books. Elsje bij de Visschen [1892] was fitted with a custom dust jacket bearing an…

The details here are fantastic. What appears to be a “normal” necklace around the woman’s neck is, in fact, a chain of small fish, and her brown hair is represented by two small flatfish beneath her lobster hat.

In cultures around the world, fish play an integral part in daily life as food, objects of study and recreational pursuit, and as characters in stories and parables. Over the last several years, I have built the portion of my collection that…