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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’.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that any essay about Jane Austen... must be in want of a poorly rendered paraphrasing of her most famous opening lines,’ writes Ella Risbridger in this sharp, gleefully obsessive field guide to romantic fiction. For her, Austen is the genre’s ‘mother’, and she crisply notes that while George Eliot disparaged ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, ‘she does appear to have read a lot of them’. Risbridger is the author of two cook books, including the award-winning Midnight Chicken (and Other Recipes Worth Living For); a children’s novel, The Secret Detectives; and the editor of anthologies of poetry and food writing. She has read a lot of romance novels, too.

Where might you observe both form policing and labour pains? What’s the difference at a casino between a flea, a vulture and a fish? Who talks about plate spinning, monkey branching and hard nexting? Why would a devotee of competitive eating (otherwise known as a gurgitator) exploit a manual typewriter yet shun the Roman method? Should you worry if a sommelier tells a colleague you are a whale and ready to drop the hammer? If a doctor identifies you as a Honda, is that praise or disapproval; and how should you feel when prescribed a therapeutic wait? This handsomely produced volume, a field guide to the esoteric languages of different professions and tribes, provides answers to all these questions and many more.

The punk icon Patti Smith’s latest memoir stretches from 1940s Michigan to present-day Nice, weaving around and complementing her other works of autobiography in its rendering of formative scenes. These include descriptions of periods of childhood illness, displays of sibling loyalty, powerful encounters with art and poetry, attachment to beloved clothes, marriage to Fred and the deaths of people close. Smith looks ahead to a time when she and her dwindling companions are gone: ‘Write for that future, says the pen.’ Our attention is periodically drawn to the pen’s motion as it ‘scratches across the page’, conjuring a lifetime of fluctuation.

Now here’s a combination you never thought you’d see, not least because one of them is dead: Maurice Sendak and Stephen King. But there they are in Hansel and Gretel (Hodder Children’s, £20). Who knew that Sendak had illustrated Grimm, or that Mr Horror wrote fairy tales? It turns out that Sendak created sets for the Humperdinck opera, and King writes to these illustrations, which loom large and dramatic. King says that he has always been attracted both to fairy tales and to Sendak, and that one image especially that spoke to him was the infamous candy house becoming a terrible face. I thought: this is what the house really looks like, a devil sick with sin, and it only shows that face when the kids turn their backs...

Vienna, 25 July 1934 is a significant date in Austria’s history. But in The Matchbox Girl, the big events happen offstage, the world seen entirely through the eyes of its youthful narrator. We focus not on the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss and a failed Nazi coup, but the children’s hospital, where 12-year-old Adelheid Brunner is waiting to be assessed for admission because she’s mute – designated ‘special’. Or, as her grandmother puts it, hopeless, ‘an idiot’. In the tall, shabby hospital, the young inmates are a protected community, closely observed by a team of specialist doctors, among them young Hans Asperger, later to find fame with his syndrome. Sister Victorine, a patient, saintly nun, oversees the gaggle of unruly, sometimes frenzied children.