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This gorgeous thirteenth-century leaf was once part of a “Laughing Carp” psalter, named for the charming line fillers drawn as fish with various expressions. This manuscript was broken by biblioclast Otto Ege and was included in his Fifty…

This photo provides a close-up of a few of the fish and some of the illumination work in this circa thirteenth-century leaf from the “Laughing Carp” psalter broken and distributed by Otto Ege. This is the oldest item in my collection.

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…

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.

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 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.

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,…

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

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…

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.