Tropical Fish Forum
Tropical Fish Keeping => General Fishkeeping Chat => Topic started by: Alex_N on January 17, 2016, 10:27:19 AM
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Has anybody got any good titles or authors of books about our hobby?
I'm generally looking for something that goes into the anatomy, species, habitats etc of our fishy friends.
Something more than 'this is a fish, it lives in water' but nothing like at a PhD level that's going to leave me bewildered.
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There is a set of books, though it is now rather old, which runs to 2 or 3 volumes. The author has a German surname but I can't for the life of me remember it :-[ I'll do some thinking and see if I can come up with it, though the set may well be too old for what you want. One shop I used that has since closed used them for finding info for customers.
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The books Sue means are the "Aquarium Atlas" series by Baensch. Look them up on EBay, they are often easy to find second hand. I have volumes 1 to 3, there are later ones but the later they get, the more obscure the species, with lots of rare catfish, killifish and cichlids. I find them fascinating and they have excellent photos. However, it makes you realise how few of these fish are actually ever available and how you will never be able to have more than a tiny percentage of them unless you have the money to set up something the size of a public aquarium........................... lottery win perhaps!
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Thank you Richard, that's the one :)
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That series looks excellent! Thank you for your help they look exactly what I'm looking forward.
:cheers:
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I'd get Volume 1 and see how you like it. It's available for very little on EBay used. It also contains a lot of info about fish biology, plants etc., some of the stuff about fishkeeping may seem out of date (it's from 1982) but a lot of it seems to me to be more sensible than some of the more "modern" ideas. It has most of the commonly available fish and a lot that are not readily available (600 fish in total) but of course there are fish common today, such as the Celestial Pearl danio, which weren't discovered or imported until later. These are fat books and so good value used, Volume 1 has 992 pages!
Other books I have are mostly pretty useless, many just repeat the same (often incorrect) information, much like many web sites...............
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That's one of the reasons I'd like a good book, the amount of information on the Internet is often contradicted on another site.
I will be sure to pick a copy up, I'm intrigued to see what fish have now been classified as there own species compared to 30 years ago.