You're gonna need a bigger haringbuis.

August 13, 2014 9:50 AM

Selected pages from Adriaen Coenen's Visboek, an illustrated guide to the strange and wonderful world of fish. No sixteenth-century mariner should leave shore without it. The National Library of the Netherlands has the complete book, with commentary.
posted by prize bull octorok (8 comments total)

Albatross around your neck sold separately.
posted by Fizz at 10:07 AM on August 13, 2014

Very cool--the explanatory "tour" in the second link is particularly useful. I'm interested that he includes traveler's tales of men with their heads below their shoulders, etc., and other kinds of land-dwelling "monsters" in a "fish book." It makes me wonder a bit about Shakespeare's Tempest where Trinculo calls Caliban a "fish." I mean, it's clear in part that Trinculo is just being silly (and deliberately insulting: "a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not of the newest Poor-John") but I wonder if the association of "strange-land-dwelling monster-person" and "fish" was more natural to a C16th audience than it is to us?
posted by yoink at 10:19 AM on August 13, 2014

That interface makes baby Zwarte Piet cry.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:55 AM on August 13, 2014

I think you undersold it; fish, yeah, but monopods, blemmys, cynocephali and God knows what.
posted by Segundus at 12:20 PM on August 13, 2014

All Sorts of god-knows-what! Wonderful. I kind of want a series of posters of those real and not-so-real creatures.
posted by ldthomps at 12:58 PM on August 13, 2014

Wow, that's a lot cooler than I expected.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:12 PM on August 13, 2014

leuk!
posted by LMGM at 2:49 PM on August 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is awesome. Great post!
posted by OmieWise at 5:09 AM on August 14, 2014