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Angling Books

Arnold Gingrich and Ernest S. Hickok

This chapter on collecting initially appeared in the American Sporting Collectors Handbook, edited by Allan J. Liu, 1976 and revised 1981.

If one considers the number of books that have been written by fisher|men, the inevitable conclusion is that here is a breed of man that is always questing, always optimistic, extremely inventive, and completely uninhibited concerning his own opinions. This combination of traits has resulted in some outstanding angling works, as well as a steady market for them.

Advice about book collecting in general is given in the chapter on hunting books, and there is no point in repeating it here. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to a representative list that, for one reason or another, has attracted the interest of anglers, and to indicate a price range where a collector can have a reasonable expectation of acquiring them, to satisfy his thirst for knowledge and/or his pride of acquisition. Within the price range, the buyer will have to decide for himself the relative importance of condition, rarity, subject matter, provenance, and the intensity Ot his personal desire to own.

Obviously, no such list can have any pretensions to completeness, as there are more than 5,000 angling books in English alone, and since English angling literature had a headstart of some 300 years over American, the majority of the titles of interest to collectors have always been those of English origin. In this century, however, the balance has begun to he redressed; in this selected list, intended to reflect the most active interest of presentday collectors, American books outnumber the English by around four to one reversing the actual numerical ratio of the two literatures.

The price groupings are broad, and in general the older the book, the nearer it will approach the top end of the indicated price range. The exceptions to this usually reflect the scarcity value imparted to a volume by an extremely limited edition.

Bargains are increasingly difficult to come by, as the last decade's explosion of interest in flyfishing has driven prices up enormously, and the listings in rare bookdealers' catalogs average three times higher now than they did in the earlytomiddle 1960s. But diligent search through the secondhand book bins, particularly away from metropolitan centers, may still turn up a collector's item at a junkyard pricetag, although the reward, per manhour of time invested in such quests, is apt to work out to somewhat less than coolie wages.

Walton is a special case, since there are well over 300 editions of his unique, all time angling classic. Your chances of stumbling on one of the first five, from the seventeenth century, are less than nil of course, but copies of the last century's editions are likely to turn up almost anywhere, as the Compleat Angler has always enjoyed wider literary currency than any other fishing book.

The beginning collector, like the beginning fisherman, is usually interested only in quantity, as he indulges his desire to read about his favorite sport. Then, as with anglers, an inclination to specialize soon manifests itself: what was begun as a mere grab bag of wanted reading matter begins to refine itself into a collection, as the fisherreader becomes aware of differences in editions and questions of condition. He soon feels the need for some books about fishing books, such as Hills, Robb, Wetzel, or Goodspeed for if he has become hooked on Walton, books by Oliver, Horne, Marston, or Woodl, and he finds that these books about rare books are rare books themselves. He learns, if he acquires some of them, that first editions arc not always the most desired editions lit's the third 1851 edition of Pulman, for instance, that contains the first mention of the dry fly as such) and that a badly battered or incomplete copy of even a prized angling book is valueless as a collector's item. By this time he has either given up collecting and gone hack to fishing or, if hc hasn't, has acquired sufficient expertise to start to specialize-collecting l)errydale Press items, for instance, where the minimum per title is from $40 to $50 and on up to $1,000- and has no further need of such general guidance as could be offered here.

By the same token, we have limited the scope of our listing to items under $300. Above that there are "rarities of a rarity," to echo Walton's "recreation of a recreation," such as the original 1888 Douglas edition of Dean Sage, which today commands some seven or eight times our top figure (and the only reprint itself costs $500). Prices go on up, even from there, to the rarefied fiscal stratosphere where the original editions of Walton fetch, or at least demand, a king's ransom. However, if your interest reaches this point, a reputable book dealer could be helpful. In a book of general circulation, it seems pointless to probe arcane areas of a hobby that unless pursued to a degree of mania, should remain an innocent pastime.

Of course, unless the prices of all fishing books soon stop mounting as they have in recent years, angling may become an endangered sport, too expensive even to read about.

And the following list, it inflation continues its inexorable and unabated spiral, may become almost quaintly antiquated before it even achieves print.

$5-$25

$25-$100

$100-$300

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