Sterba, Aquarium Care

My copy of Günther Sterba's Aquarium Care: a comprehensive guide (1967) is battered from many readings and water-stained. An English version of Sterba's Aquarienkunde (first published in 1954), the book, printed in East Germany, was distributed in the US by E.P.Dutton & Co., New York (and in the UK by The Pet Library).  For the English-language market it was designed to complement Sterba's Freshwater Fishes of the World, but in Germany it formed volume one of a set that included Dr Sterba's book on reef fishes, Korallenfische. Sterba's Aquarium Care wasn't for sale in the local fish store here in the US, and I've never met anyone who's read it in this version: the copyright was picked up by Axeldrod's TFH Publications and reissued in the TFH format in 1981, lightly abridged, as Dr Sterba's Aquarium Handbook. For me, it was an eye-opening entry into the science of the natural aquarium.
 
Dr Sterba is a widely-respected German ichthyologist, a full professor in zoology and director of the Zoological Institute of the Karl-Marx University of Leipzig, and a member of the Royal Swdedish Academy of Sciences. Two fishes' names honor him: Corydoras sterbai  and a South American characid darter also named for Jacques Géry, Geryichthys sterbai.
 
At a time when the American fishkeeper was being offered manufactured and pre-packaged  plastic undergravel filtration systems, aquarium keeping in the isolation of the unlamented old German Democratic Republic demanded a level of dexterity I could never have attained. Sterba's original volume begins with the laborious assembly of the aquariums themselves, framed in angle-iron that was painted with red lead-- and a recipe is given for that too, if it were locally unavailable to the Communist consumer. This was material unlikely to appeal to the American consumer, but the fine line drawings integral to the text were retained.
 
In furnishing the aquarium, Dr Sterba observed that the first step is to decide which species of fish are to be kept; their requirements dictate the "underwater landscape"(Sterba's words) you'll be creating., and in a chapter headed "The relationship of animals and plants to the aquatic environment" he covered the cycling of living matter and later introduced the "biotope aquarium". What an eye-opener was his careful description of pH and the effects respiration of all the organisms in the aquarium had on it.
 
With Sterba's book I passed from an enthusiastic child to an adult.