Dedicated to Fancy Guppy breeding in the UK

 

 More F.G.A Memories -   Alan Charlton - ©

When I set down to write the article “FGA – Up and Down” I didn’t really feel that I was following in the footsteps of Edward Gibbon with his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. I realised later that actually, in relation to the subject, I was writing a much more important account. Gibbon had plenty of prior published sources, which would still be there for the following generations of historians. On the other hand, if I didn’t get down the history of the FGA I doubt there would be anyone else who would do it and there would be virtually no information lying around for them either. This did encourage me to put in anything I could think of, though. And if any readers feel they have material to add I’d be happy to include it. 

I decided to scan some of the Standard Handbooks (1961, 1967, 1973) and the last Judges Course and make these available as PDF files. I felt they might be interesting historic items in their own right, and could also provide food for thought for anyone currently involved with these aspects of guppies. 

In his novel “The Go-Between” L.P. Hartley wrote “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. I didn’t have this in mind when I wrote the article FGA – Rise and Fall but it kept leaping out as I went along. Just looking at the old Standard Handbooks and Judges Course brings it out too. In the early days the Handbook was professionally typeset and printed. Later ones are much more DIY typescript productions run off by an offset process. The FGA had vanished long before it would have been feasible to lay out any of these productions by a desktop publishing system. Actually it’s just as well that this was not around in Jim Kelly’s time. It’s obvious that he did all the layout for the 1967 Handbook, and had just learned what could be done with rub-on symbols! Given the DTP tools we have today, Jim would have put all the bells and whistles on, and hung fairy lights on them too for good measure.  

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Links to the files:

                                   FGA - Judges Course

 FGA - Handbook 1961     FGA - Handbook 1967     FGA - Handbook 1973