I always say this but there is more to my interest in whisky than just purely the whisky. People don’t get it or believe me but it’s true. I get just as much if not more enjoyment from the peripherals around the drink; be it the social history, the marketing, the logistics or simply just reading someone’s passion in a book.

Jackson’s books are produced by exactly that sort of author. Starting his career writing about beer at a time in the 1970’s and 80’s when you could make a living from such a thing this book “The World Guide to Whisky” was his first book to leave behind beer and consider the distilled version..whisky. First published in 1987 this example I have is a first edition from that year. Intentionally, also the year of my birth. Purchased for the mad price of two pounds from our village charity shop it was a lovely little find.

Jackson would go on to write extensively on whisky and is perhaps best remembered for the descriptor “Flora & Fauna” to describe the collection of single malts from United Distillers (now Diageo). In 1991 the collection didn’t have an overall title and “Flora & Fauna” ended up sticking and being still used today.

Back to the book though and it contains over 200 images but not just of Scotch whisky. Sure, of the 224 pages the first 100 cover Scotland but Ireland, Canada, USA and Japan also get a section and while this isn’t all the world producing countries today in 1987 it would be almost the complete market represented. Speaking of the 80’s this book has gone from being a reference guide about whisky to being a historical text of the whisky industry over 30 years ago. For me, the particularly interesting part is the last part of each section where a selection of labels are montages of the time period. Some distilleries are long side dead and turned into flat or just plain bulldozed, others under new management but all look completely different today as then. Indeed, some of these were insignificant in 1987 but today will require a mortgage to pick up at auction.

It’s a funny old world