The Rainbow Fish 1992

The little blue fish whizzed through the ocean with his scale flashing, so it didn’t take long before the Rainbow Fish was surrounded by the other fish. Everyone wanted a glittering scale.

The Rainbow Fish shared his scales left and right. And the more delighted he became. When the water around him filled with glittering scales, he at last felt at home among the other fish.

Delicate watercolour hues are the background for this undersea fantasy scene. Bubbles signify the dialogue between the fish. Besides his rainbow scales – foil stamped – the main character is distinguished for the reader by his yellow lips.  Rainbow Fish’s most expressive feature is its mouth, which in this picture is beginning to twitch into a smile, with the prospect of being accepted by the school around him. The clam and scallop are saying nothing.

I’ve included this book even though I have never read it aloud to any child nor ever will. Part of my rationale for this blog was to include books that were important and of their time. As I’ve previously posted about technological changes to book design and production, the printing effects in this one qualify it for inclusion here. Like most publishing for children, it doesn’t need my approbation – according to the blurb on a 2022 edition, 30 million copies have been sold worldwide.

This year, I was married and living on twenty acres. Making my own bread and soap (not in the same pot); spinning yarn and shovelling manure for the vegetables I cooked and froze … and preparing for the arrival of a new reader in the family. Big Bob was on his way, and assuming a reading posture already.

I was not buying books, certain that the ones I had accumulated would be sufficient. So I missed this debut, and it wouldn’t come into my orbit until early educators introduced my children to it. Fortunately by then, they had lived with and loved Leo Lionni’s Swimmy which inoculated them against what Marcia Brown described as:

the saccharinity of greeting cards books that possibly filled some emotional need and were very successful commercially but which did not even attempt to give a child an honest picture of himself or life around him.

Or, as Miss May observed when she was in first grade, Fish can’t live without scales!

I could be a lot ruder about the Rainbow Fish but others have done it for me. LeVar Burton’s take is the best, thanks to bookshelves of doom for relating it.

More about Marcia Brown next time.