In 1755, Samuel Johnson (this was before his honorary doctorates) defined the herring as ‘a small sea-fish’, and that was it. By contrast, Graeme Rigby has spent 25 obsessive years documenting the cultural and economic importance of this creature. The resulting omnium-gatherum is like the bulging cod-end of a bumper trawl net, farctate with glistening details that embrace zooarchaeology, cooperage, otoliths, skaldic verse and Van Gogh’s ear.

Clupea harengus is a highly adaptable, widely distributed marine teleost that can form shoals covering several square miles, and their milky spawning trails are so long they can be seen from space. The name may derive from the Germanic heer (army), and its nicknames include ‘Digby Chickens’. In Greenland, you should ask for Angmagssagssuaq. The book’s sub-title alludes to the ‘King of Fishes’, and the author confidently states: ‘Some claim salmon is, but they’re just riparian hobbyists.’ (There go centuries of angling literature, then.)

Rigby cites many of his precursor ‘herringists’, but his twin cynosures are that protean pamphleteer Thomas Nashe (in particular his 1599 Lenten Stuffe) and Paul Neucrantz, the author of a ‘medico-historico-zoological treatise’, De Harengo (1654). Rigby’s own scale of reference........

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