Coffee Table Book of: Fancy Goldfish (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Fancy Goldfish is a large format book of fancy goldfish, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: hooded orandas, smooth backed ranchus and lionheads, deep bodied ryukins, velvet black moors, telescopes, celestials and bubble eyes, domed pearlscales, flowing veiltails and fantails, butterfly tails, pompons, sleek single tailed comets and mottled shubunkins.

Every fish in the book belongs to a single domesticated carp species shaped by centuries of selection: egg shaped bodies and slender pond forms, doubled tails fanned out like silk drapery, backs with no dorsal fin at all, soft raspberry textured hoods grown over the head, eyes turned permanently upward, and delicate fluid sacs carried beneath the sockets.

Seen close are the structures and colours built from a few shared pigments and reflective crystals: branching bony rays inside a translucent tail web, paired pectoral fins sculling to hold a fish still, raised calcified domes along a pearlscale’s flank, burnished metallic orange, matte pink, velvet black, slate blue and calico mottling.

Around the fish sit the quiet waters they inhabit across the year: glazed celadon and porcelain basins viewed from above, weathered wooden tubs in spring mist, sunlit garden lily ponds, a pond sealed under clear winter ice, amber eggs clinging to green hornwort, newly hatched fry and young bronze juveniles.

Short notes run through the book, on how selection shaped one pond carp into so many varieties, how fins, scales, swim bladders and senses work in water, and how fancy goldfish feed, school, spawn and overwinter: lionhead and ranchu varieties carry no dorsal fin, and their backs are prized for a smooth even curve, single tailed varieties stay closest to the ancestral pond fish and swim far faster than twin tailed forms, the fleshy head growth called a wen thickens over the fish’s life into a soft raspberry textured cap, and each scale on a pearlscale goldfish has a raised calcified dome that catches the light like a row of beads.

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