Innes, Exotic Aquarium Fishes

After an interval of many years I have a copy once again of William T. Innes, Exotic Aquarium Fishes. The edition is the nineteenth, revised 1964, in fact the last edition in its original version published by The Aquarium Publishing Company, Norristown, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., before the copyright, which Mr Innes in his advanced age had failed to renew, was taken up by his brash successor in the aquarium publishing field, Dr Herbert R. Axelrod, and reissued in cheapened format.
 
The volume is just as I remembered it when I set eyes on it again, an exemplar of the quality jobbing printer's art,  for William Thornton Innes, Jr,  had inherited his family printing concern in Philadelphia many years before. Its stiff dark green covers are embossed to simulate grained morocco leather and stamped in gold with a framed vignette of  Rasbora heteromorpha  as it then was called; the familiar endpages are printed with squared maps of the world on the Mercator projection; inside the front cover is the Western world, showing Africa and Central and South America, and inside the rear the Eastern world, lettered and numbered along the margins so that you can locate, say F39, D34, x38 pinpointing Rasbora heteromorpha in its home waters in Siam and the Malay Peninsula. And here is the color plate of Rasbora heteromorpha  too, a triumph of color photogravure, tipped-in by hand to face the title page.
 
On the verso of the title page, there is Mr Innes himself, in  suit and tie, steel-bespectacled, benign yet serious, freshly shaved and slightly jowled, the upright product of Quaker schooling, over the facsimile of his signature Wm. T. Innes and the thoughtful parenthetic "(Pronounced Inn' es)". It is a book I still knew by heart, after decades without it, though our own copy, mine and my brother's, was the 1954 edition that followed the year 1953 when there had been two printings, January and July, all scrupulously recorded on the title page verso. I recalled even the faintly medicinal odor of its dense glazed paper stock, still unyellowed after all this time, that gives the volume a heft in the hand you might not expect in a modern book. My copy even has its dust wrapper.
 
The title page fairly reports the work: Exotic Aquarium Fishes, A Work of General Reference, as it most certainly was, the very bible of American aquarium-keeping during its first, electrified  maturity, right from its initial printing in May 1935. A foreword to the revision is signed by Helen Simkatis, editor of Innes' monthly magazine The Aquarium. The subtitle reports that the volume has been edited by George S. Myers, A.M., Ph.D,  Professor of Biology, Stanford University  In fact the prominent ichthyologist George Myers, a dedicated aquarist himself, had been the younger  friend of Innes from the first and an editor  of the volume and a contributor to The Aquarium. His presence on the title page foretells the coming end: Mr Innes died 27 February 1969, the dean of American aquaristics.
 
 
The book had an undeniably old-fahioned quality even as it came off the press, with its somewhat Art Deco printer's vignettes and repeated wave-like framings of section headings. I recognized in the "Living Fishfoods" chapter the familiar photograph of six men "Collecting Daphnia from a Characteristic Dump Pond": they line up along the edge of the weedy pond wielding their long-handled nets, which are being emptied into a dark metal can. Up the bank their boxy 1920s autos are lined up, and faintly on the horizon appear ghostly transmission towers and industrial chimneys. They are intent on their errand; not all have removed their suit  jackets. It is a fish club.  Doubtless the photographer was Mr Innes himself.
 
Each species is allotted a single page, headed with its illustration, male and female. The monochrome  plates, from photographs taken himself by  Innes, who introduced aquarium photography in his goldfish book of 1917, show fishes in the cramped confines of the photographer's shallow temporary  tank. The color plates were based on photographs that had been so thoroughly retouched in color  that they are in essence watercolors reproduced in color lithography: here I first saw Barbus nigrofasciatus in full breeding glory and was overcome, and killifishes I'd never seen in life. A photograph of angelfishes with their young, with stems of red Ludwigia, was captioned as the first successful color-process aquarium photograph: here it is still presented in 1964. A handful of fishes newly on the market are illustrated in color photographs: Botia macracantha, as it then was known, the Clown Loach, and Cheirodon axelrodi, the Cardinal Tetra. Drawings and diagrams make everything clear: in the "Innes book" I was introduced to daphnia through a line drawing that showed rotifers attached to the daphnid's carapace.
 
The "Innes book" had come in when electricity was being applied to fish-keeping, with incandescent light, partially-submerged electrical heaters with a coil inside a glass tube and pumps that compressed air, whose rising bubbles forced a column of water slowly through glass wool filter media. Even if the technological supports it described seem quaintly antique, the book was based on  principles that remain sound today: "Liberal Water Surfaces, Right Temperature, Enough Light, Water Quality, Correct Feeding".   "The soundest principle is to have only enough fish in an aquarium so that the air-surface-per-fish is sufficient to give them ample oxygen and to discharge carbon dioxide without depending on any other source." Italics were supplied by Mr Innes, whose ratio of inches-per-fish to square-inches-of-water-surface is still sometimes applied today.