Coffee Table Book of: Betta (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Betta is a large-format coffee table book: the betta, printed edge to edge, one picture to a page.

It begins with the fins, and with the fact that they are not natural. A wild betta is short-finned and drab. Every trailing veil in this book is the result of a century of selective breeding, and the shapes have names because someone chose them.

Then the structure. Each fin ray divides as it approaches the edge, and the number of divisions is one of the things a breeder is counting. The colour is structural rather than painted, crystals in the scale bend light instead of absorbing it, which is why it shifts as the fish turns and why it cannot be mixed from pigment.

Then the behaviour the fish is named for, and the correction it needs. The aggression is territorial rather than constant: kept apart, they settle within moments. The display is mostly display.

Then the nest, which is the part nobody expects. The male builds a raft of bubbles under a floating leaf, and then stays beneath it doing almost nothing else, refusing food for days. Guarding is close to the whole of his work.

Short notes run through the book. Each one is about the animal rather than the picture, why the colour shifts with the angle, why a bare tank leaves the fish with nothing it needs, and why the edge of a colour is never quite a line.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.