Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring

Almost everything you didn’t know you needed to know about Atlantic herrings can be found in this book. (Pacific and Baltic herrings are in there too.) Yes, they changed the world—everything changes everything—but herrings make the world bigger. With spawnings seen from space, a trillion individuals make this one of the tastiest and most abundant vertebrates on Earth.

Between ‘A Beginning’ and ‘Zuiderzee’, count the wars fought over herrings; don’t forget Scotland vs the Holy Roman Empire. The herring’s high-pitched farts were logged as Soviet submarines and received an Ig Nobel Prize. One herring joke featured in four Shakespeare plays; a Jonson; the glorious, suppressed fantasia Nashes Lenten Stuffe; and one suppressed and lost play. And what of Van Gogh’s ear? Herrings also laugh at taxonomists; physically change with sea temperature and salinity; stuff predators full to bursting, then swim away. (Well, it worked for 100,000,000 years.)

The Great Sardine Litigation? The true history of kippers? Bloaters? Reds? Chopped herring? Shuba? All this and more. Between the Herring Industry Board’s ‘Eat more herrings!’, sixteenth-century Bavaria’s ‘Herrings, herrings, stinking herrings’ and sustainable fishery genetics, every entry is a story, a comic journey, an adventure. Some even come with recipes.