Howdy from cow town!

[Innesfan]

I definitely need to track that down! This fat bugger has been my go-to, but it came out almost 30 years after Innes's book and it'd be interesting to compare the two.
View attachment 373888

Yet another of the scoundrel Axelrod's underhanded moves: stealing Innes's title. The word "Exotic" to describe what had previously and commonly been called "tropical" fishes was Innes's invention, and Axelrod's book and the choice of title was a clear effort to mislead the buying public as to what book this actually was. He had already stolen Innes's images, for which he got sued and lost, and later, when the copyright of EAF expired, he then stole the book itself. As I've often said, Axelrod had pathological Innes-envy.

If you do get a copy of Innes, make sure you get one of the original 19 editions and not Metaframe's or, worse, Axelrod's bastardizations of same. The real deal is recognized by the green cover with a stamped-in-gold image of a trio of Harlequin Rasboras.

 

[Fishmanic]

Welcome to TFF. Show us your pics of your tank(s). Hope you enter our contests. Pet of the Month is starting to take entries soon. If you have a pet besides fish, you should enter the contest.
I’m one of several moderators here.
My avatar is an ornament that resembles me and he’s holding the BAN hammer which is used on wayward members who break the rules. Luckily I don’t have to use it very often.

 

[gimme30]

Thanks Fishmanic! Yours is another one I'd have never guessed so thanks too for the clarification, and I do hereby solemnly swear that I will try not to get up to any mischief.
And I definitely intend to enter, and win by huge margins, every contest held! Besides the international audience that's one of the big appeals to this forum. I've only got 4 tanks though, and a completely graceless cat, so I'm afraid I won't have too many entries before people start asking "Hey, are you really going to post that AGAIN?'
I'm all about low maintenance so my little glass boxes don't change much, except for never-ending plant rotation. IE: New pretty in, dead not-so-pretty out.

I'm not really sure where I'd post pics. I've considered starting a journal, as I'm about to tear down a relatively new bowfront and start over, but once the transformation is complete there really wouldn't be much to write about. Kinda seems like a waste of bandwidth.

@GaryE & @Innesfan Yikes! Message received! Do not bring up the A word!
To be completely honest I had no idea about Axelrod-had to look up what you were talking about. The PT Barnum of fish indeed. Now I'm questioning if I can trust anything in that huge book. It's not the only one of his I've got either.

They may both find themselves in the ol' wood burning stove this winter.

 

[Innesfan]

@GaryE & @Innesfan Yikes! Message received! Do not bring up the A word!
To be completely honest I had no idea about Axelrod-had to look up what you were talking about. The PT Barnum of fish indeed. Now I'm questioning if I can trust anything in that huge book. It's not the only one of his I've got either.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. While it might not be my favorite book, there's merit to some of it. And his collaborators were better at it than he was, and they probably did the heavy lifting writing-wise.

But he was a scoundrel and an olympic liar. Some of his fantasies: he claimed to have met Emperor Hirohito and had a discussion of marine invertebrates with him. He said he corresponded with Winston Churchill about goldfish, and attended lectures at Princeton by Albert Einstein. He claimed to have swum 24 km across Lake Ontario at the age of 10, and collected black panthers in the Amazon jungle for Walt Disney. All have been debunked.

The Hirohito myth was another bit of Innes-envy. The Emperor, when he was the Crown Prince and an avid aquarist, visited Philadelphia expressly to meet Innes and get a tour of the fish rooms of the legendary Philly aquarists, especially the goldfish breeders. Innes chronicled this in his magazine, The Aquarium. So Axelrod, of course, had to co-opt the story.