One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish,
Black fish, Blue fish, Old fish, New fish.
This one has a little car.
This one has a little star.
Say! What a lot of fish there are.
So wrote Theodor Seuss Geisel in the opening of his 1960 published now classic book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. It isn’t known if he was thinking of the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea when declaring “what a lot of fish there are,” but it would be entirely understandable if he had been.
More recently, another Theodore, this time Theodore Wells Pietsch, along with James Wilder Orr and illustrator Joseph R. Tomelleri were in fact very clearly thinking about all the fishes to be found in this remarkable body of water when they created their monumental Fishes of the Salish Sea; Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca and O what a lot of fish there are in its pages!
Two-hundred-sixty different species of the marine and anadromous fishes to be exact, all known to be found in the area; each one vividly illustrated in full color on high quality paper and accompanied by complete identification and life history essays. Of course, when you have so many full-color illustrations as this work contains, as well as further black and white illustrations, maps, keys, and other valuable information, you can’t expect it all to be bound into a single volume; which is why University of Washington Press has published it as a three volume set, all collected together in a vividly decorated slipcase.
I won’t simply be looking into this remarkable new book, I expect to be becoming wholly and blissfully lost among its vast sea of remarkable ichthyological illustrations and wave upon wave of explanatory written passages. Don’t you dare send out the Coast Guard; I have no intention of voluntarily surfacing anytime soon.
