Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring

Description

This book contains almost everything you didn’t know you needed to know about Atlantic herrings. (Pacific and Baltic varieties are in there too.) 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.

From ‘A Beginning’ to ‘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 one herring joke featured in a Jonson play, four Shakespeare plays and the glorious, suppressed fantasia Nashes Lenten Stuffe. Herrings mock taxonomists; physically change with sea temperature and salinity; stuff predators full to bursting, then swim away.

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

Reviews

‘Everything you needed to know, and a few things you possibly never needed to know, about the world’s most encyclopaedic fish.’ — Giles MacDonogh, former food and drink writer, Financial Times

‘Just like the small but power-packed herring, these encyclopaedic pages are stuffed with a dream-like fishy sufficiency to satisfy the neediest herring aficionado’s appetite; “only nibbling at the edge of the shoal”, doubtful! I’d say. From now on, my world of herrin’ology will never be the same again.’ — Mike Smylie, AKA ‘The Kipperman’, author of Herring: A History of the Silver Darlings

‘It is not inverse snobbery that causes me to prefer herring to salmon. It is, quite simply, a matter of taste. Which is just one of this creature’s manifold properties: for the rest, get reading.’ — Jonathan Meades, journalist, essayist, film-maker, and author of Empty Wigs

‘An incredible insight to hidden histories surrounding the herring trade, Graeme Rigby reminds us why this little sliver darling is so important to understanding the past, the present and learning for the future. Absolutely lush!’ — Joanne Coates, award-winning working class photographer and artist, and curator of the Red Herring exhibition, Helmsdale

‘Graeme Rigby has done for the herring what Pliny the Elder did for everything else. Erudite, eccentric, and unexpectedly moving, this encyclopaedia rescues the herring from obscurity and repositions it—gleaming, iridescent, and gloriously pungent—at the very centre of history. A shimmering feast of facts and fables, with a glint in its eye and a whiff of brine in its wake.’ — Christopher Beckman, author of A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine

‘Rigby’s is a treasure trove of all things herring—brimming with dazzling facts, deep history, and irresistible oddities. Dive in and prepare to fall head over heels for the silver stars of the sea.’ — Poul Holm, Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, Trinity College Dublin

 ‘An original, poignant excavation of one of history’s most misunderstood fish. Layering deep scholarship with mischievous wit, Rigby builds a kaleidoscopic monument to the herring’s place in science, culture, war, art, and memory. This is not just a book about a fish—it’s a brilliant meditation on curiosity, storytelling, and the shimmering drift of history itself.’ — David Willer, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge

Author(s)

Graeme Rigby’s encyclopaedia grew out of a BBC Radio 4 series on preserved fish, Rigby’s Red Herrings, and the blogs and podcasts website herripedia.com. Part of Amber Film & Photography Collective for nearly twenty years, his allotment documentary book Peaceable Kingdoms was a collaboration with photographer Peter Fryer.