Book of Fishes (National Geographic)

Literary scholar Stephanie L. Hawkins explains that, “as one of the world’s most widely recognized distributors of global images, National Geographic has filled an important role in what Arjun Appadurai has termed the global mediascape” by circulating knowledge about distant lands and peoples among their readers (9). The National Geographic's Book of Fishes attests to this role by demonstrating how the National Geographic brand extended beyond the well-known magazine, first published in 1888, to offer stand-alone reference books and, in the twenty-first century, web content.   

The Book of Fishes combines text with colour photographs and reproductions of paintings, demonstrating the ease with which different media could be printed side-by-side in the twentieth century. From the 1950s up until 1978, National Geographic employed four-colour process letterpress to print their images. By 1958, when this book was published, it was no longer remarkable to include photographs in a reference book, as it had been in publications like Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) or Hoofs, Claws and Antlers of the Rocky Mountains by the Camera (1894).

A full scan of a 1961 edition of The Book of Fishes is available through the Internet Archive. The copy included here forms part of Bruce Peel Special Collections' Bruce P. Dancik Collection of Angling Books.