Don't Be Like The Rainbow Fish

LIKE SO MANY of the best socialist products, Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish has been a runaway capitalist success.

- Matt Welch

The children’s classic, in which the most brightly colored fish in the ocean finds happiness only after handing over all but one of his glittering scales under duress to the gray grumps around him, has sold since its 1992 debut more than 30 million copies worldwide.

Whereas Rainbow Fish achieves transcendence through literally becoming colorless, the exact opposite was the case for The Rainbow Fish. Using an expensive and novel combination of holographic foil stamping and watercolor, the Swiss-born Pfister and his publisher, NorthSouth Books, produced a striking visual package that proved irresistible.

“The effect of the stamping was so nice that all the bookshops here in Switzerland put it in the windows,” Pfister recalled in a 2013 interview with Publisher’s Weekly. “We decided that I’d get only 50 percent of my usual royalties for the book, and only that way was it possible to make it work.” Looks like a win-win.