| Sumario: | Louis Renard's Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes, de diverses couleurs et figures extraordinaires (1719) is one of the earliest books on fishes to be issued with color plates. Over four hundred vibrantly colored animals are depicted across one hundred hand-colored copper engravings. The book appeared in three editions—1719, 1754, and 1782—from three different publishers in the Netherlands, with no edition exceeding one hundred copies published. While extensive work has been done previously to document the book's complicated publication history, our work reveals significant new evidence in the production of the book's second edition. After the discovery of an uncolored copy on the market which showed unusual ink markings on two of the plates, we compared the plates to other copies across editions to help determine the printing priority of copies issued by the publishers of the second edition, Reinier and Josue Ottens. We determined that ink markings visible on the second volume's plates XXIX and XXXI are potentially from corrosion to the copperplates that occurred while they were in storage and that copies of the second edition without these markings were likely printed by the publisher of the first edition, Louis Renard, but reissued by the Ottens under their own imprint. While it was previously known that some copies of the second edition included plates printed by Renard, our paper presents the first evidence to help determine which copies were printed by Renard.
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