GEAR & REVIEWS
GEAR BOOK REVIEWS
The last twelve months have been good for print publications. Here are two books you ll definitely want to seek out…
THE BICHIR HANDBOOK
Author: Joshua Pickett
ISBN: 9781789727708
Pages: 144
List price: £25
Bibliophiles will recognise Joshua Pickett as the designer behind Ivan Mikolji’s recent ‘Fishes of the Orinoco’ project. This time, being his own boss, Joshua’s creative brakes are off, resulting in a book with astonishing design values.
The book is built around a single theme, and that theme is bichirs (buh-sheer, is clarified at the start) and remains true to that throughout, never digressing or straying from the polypterids at hand.
As soon as you open it up you’re hit with additional treats - a two-sided Polypterus poster and a bookmark that doubles as a checklist to record all of the species you’ve kept yourself. If you’ve bought directly from the website, you may have a signature from the author, too.
With such focused subject matter, you might be worried that the book has lots of unnecessary fleshing out and repetition, but the reality is that Joshua has assembled what is possibly the single most comprehensive work on this family of fish.