Article © Julian Dignall, uploaded January 01, 2002.

Firstly I should say that any person keeping fish today should have this book, if you don't, go buy it now or at LEAST put it on your Christmas or birthday wish list. Now that I have that out of the way, let's have a look at the book itself.

This, the first of five volumes (unfortunately only the first three are currently available in English), deals with commonly available species. The general idea being that successive volumes deal with more and more esoteric fish. There are very competent introduction, systems and chemistry chapters followed by a much overlooked plants section (featuring 100 species).

After plants, onto fish logically starting with ichthyology, discussions of biotope aquariums (remember this book was written in 1982) and then the family by family, species by species accounts. Catfish are given a good share of this section. Each of the 600 fish has a colour photo of a live fish and good information. The icing on the cake are general, common name, scientific name and synonym indexes. Magic. When writing this I was looking for bad points to balance the review; I found none.

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