The dried skin of a fish hangs over my head as I type. It has been there for nearly two years, and no longer smells as it did for weeks after I slit the animal in half fig. This sea bass from the grocery store, now a specimen, was my attempt to understand a widespread but little-remembered practice in eighteenth-century science that might seem strange to us today: to dry, bisect, and flatten animals like fish, and then glue or stitch them on paper or slip them in books like pressed flowers fig.
Many more naturalists would publish variant recipes. The half-skins also served more practical ends by facilitating colonial expansion and the creation of universal taxonomies, or systems for arranging nature. Each fish became fused with metadata and annotations written on its paper background or on the skin itself fig.
As a form of early modern information management, this fish paperwork made the animals of the far reaches of an empire visible and readily accessible to those seeking to exploit them. Flattened fish were not merely objects to be shipped efficiently: they were surfaces for storing knowledge. In some ways, my own fish seems an inadequate window into this history.
My experiment, which involved an hour of indelicate hacking at fish flesh, proved a stickier venture. Most specimens I have observed are thinner than cardstock and astoundingly flat, and some are flush with the paper, with barely a bubble, ripple, or ridge. Mine, however, continues to curve back to its living form, while its crunchiness also evident in a large crack prevents me from fully flattening it after the fact.
Caretaking has produced its own anxieties, as I kept my specimen atop my tallest bookshelf and away from a curious cat for months, but as a result, dropped it from six feet in the air when collecting it for reexamination, and lost a pelvic fin in the process. For easier retrieval, transport, and long-term storage, I opted to keep the fish in a shadow box designed for war medals instead of on paper fig.
