Fishing and Reading

by CHARLES E. GOODSPEED

1

AS I look at my collection of angling books, with a few notable exceptions like The Compleat Angler the older volumes appear to include a greater preponderance of practical manuals than those of the last seventy-five years. Interest in what we might call the idyllic element in the fisherman’s experiences apparently has increased with the years.Where the Bright Waters Meet, Thy Rod and Thy Creel, Days in the Open, The Pursuit of the Trout, An Angler’s Hours, and Fishing Memories are a few recent book titles which indicate at least a growing appreciation of the lighter side of the angler’s sport. Works of this kind are in the minority but, with the excellent examples of angling fiction (principally humorous) which are now common, they supply a useful antidote to the spirit which finds its pleasure too exclusively in the mere attainment of skill.

On this practical side angling has now a new interest — the cult of fishing with the dry or floating fly. Many books have been written on the subject. The most distinguished contributor to this branch of angling literature was the late Frederic M. Halford. Of his six scientifically conceived and, in certain issues, expensively produced manuals, I have five. The titles run as follows: Dry-Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice; Dry Fly Entomology; Floating Flies and How to Dress Them; The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook; Modern Development of the Dry Fly.

The three largest existing collections of angling books made by individuals in this country are those of Daniel B. Fearing of Newport, Henry A. Sherwin of Cleveland, and Dean Sage of Albany. Sage’s collection has been dispersed. Sherwin’s is still in the family of the collector. Fearing’s is at Harvard. It is the largest, comprising about 11,000 volumes. But Fearing was not a collector of books on pleasurefishing only; his purchases embraced subjects remotely connected with recreation and included a mass of material on fishing as a means of livelihood. He also had many works on the quaintly designated whale “fishery.”

In Sage’s catalogue the titles are not numbered, but I should estimate the footing to be around 3000. Sherwin had about 4000 volumes. (Sage, and possibly Sherwin also, with but minor exceptions excluded works extraneous to fishing for sport.) I mention these figures to show how relatively small are collections like my own, which hovers around the 1000 mark. If, however, one happens to lack the wealth or the opportunities of the older collectors it is yet possible, by discrimination, for him to build an interesting collection. Dean Sage, in the preface to his library catalogue, has this to say: —

“There is, unfortunately, no rule by which to determine how much angling matter is required to make a book eligible for a collection on this subject. Leaving the matter thus to the fancy of the collector makes all collections liable to criticism; but so long as Walton’s Lives, which are as destitute of angling material as the prayer-book, is considered an important item in angling collections, the door seems open even to entomological works.”

I suppose that Fearing must have found some pleasure in the works related to commercial fishing which are found in his really magnificent collection of angling books. To the student they are of course valuable, but to the booklover they are about as interesting as the dead fish they deal with. Of what possible interest to the angler are statutes such as that of George III “Amending the laws relating to the allowance of the bounties on pilchards exported”?

As for myself, I am interested only in recreational fishing; therefore my collection wholly concerns that subject. It includes of course many books which, being the productions of a later generation, the old collections lack. In typography and illustration modern fishing books compare well with English publications of a century ago, a time when many fine books were made. It is therefore regrettable that persons who leave books on particular subjects to public institutions seldom provide for such future additions as arc necessary to keep their collections alive.

2

IZAAK WALTON, patron saint of anglers, who, with his not at all saintly partner, Charles Cotton, wrote The Compleat Angler in the form in which it is now generally published, is the book collector s ideal author. The editions of his great book are many; they vary from cheap penny publications to others produced in the grand manner. Textually, the five editions which came out during his lifetime differ, the rare second being greatly enlarged. The fifth edition, the commonest and the last to appear before Walton’s death, is unique, for it included for the first time not only the second part, which Cotton contributed, but the work of another author also. This last, a book of which three editions had been published independently, was The Experienced Angler, written by a Parliamentary soldier named Venables. These three treatises were bound in a fat little volume to which a general title page, “The Universal Angler,” was given. This was the only edition of Walton and Cotton to contain Venables’s book and the “Universal” title page.

During Walton’s lifetime there lived an obscure individual named Richard Franck, who wrote three books. I have them — three rather shabby volumes. Franck was a one-time trooper in Cromwell’s army and both fanatically and fantastically religious. Most of his writing is absurdly bombastic; yet his principal book is interesting, for its sound angling instruction, particularly for salmon fishing, shows him to have been a good fisherman — as far as we know, the best, of his time. Northern Memoirs, written in 1658, three years before the third edition of The Compleat Angler came out, records a personal meeting and disagreement with Walton when the two met in Stafford.

The two fishermen seem to have had an argument on a subject concerned with ichthyological biology; whereupon, Franck says, Walton “huff’d away. Franck, who appears to have been in the right, was cantankerously disputatious, but Walton was one of those quiet men who abhor an argument. Franck’s contempt for Walton’s naïve acceptance of the fabulous stories written by Gesner and Dubravius, not less than for Walton’s fishing instructions, is offensively expressed. His fishing principles are exemplary.

Northern Memoirs is a scarce book, and Franck’s two other productions are even rarer. They, however, contain only slight references to fishing. His posthumous (?) contribution to religious literature, The Admirable and Indefatigable Adventures of the Nine Pious Pilgrims Devoted to Sion by the Cross of Christ; and Piloted by Evangelist to the New Jerusalem, was, as the title page to that turgid book states, “written in America, in a time of solitude and Divine contemplation.” One clear fishing reference stands out in this volume. An allegorical character, Chastity by name, caught with her hands “a trout, a most lovely trout!” The details of Franck’s visit to this country have as yet eluded me.

Fifteen years ago I was in business correspondence with a Japanese professor of English in Tokyo. One of his requisitions was for The Compleat Angler, which he was about to edit and print for his students’ use. Curious to learn what an Oriental mind might find in Walton’s classic, I asked for his estimate of the book. I hope that he did not guess what impertinent thought prompted this request. Professor Okakura’s courteous response showed how little difference there was between the working of his mind and that of any Western scholar:—

“As to the author of The Compleat Angler, here are some of my reasons why I feel strongly attracted to his ever-interesting work on ‘the contemplative man’s recreation.’

“Walton, like a true lover of Nature and Man, took to his work, not for any worldly considerations of mere fame or gain, but for a hearty enjoyment of life as he came across [it] in the unsophisticated rural surroundings. His musings over a still float at some quieter corner of a quiet side of the river, often drove him, we may suppose, into the inner world of heart and soul, there to let him see humanity at large in its frailties and vain glory: and for these very weaknesses, ’we’ seemed to him the dearer, if anything, and led him to shed on ‘us’ loving smiles, not unaccompanied by warm tears of compassion. He must have felt himself in sweet harmony with his environment as well as his own private self. He was now free as any one would be when reaching this state of our emotional life.

“Angling in this way was with him, not a mere art, but a great cult, as shared and instanced by all the true poets and men of letters, both east and west.”

Professor Okakura’s edition of The Compleat Angler with his Japanese notes is, I imagine, scarce, as it was sold only in a set of some thirty volumes of English classics. I have kept one of the two separate copies which the editor gave me. The other I sent to the Harvard Library.

The earliest book which deals with actual fishing in my collection is Gervase Markham’s The Pleasures of Princes or Good Men’s Recreations, 1635. It is not a very early edition and in rarity does not compare with Thomas Barker’s Art of Angling, 1651. Both of these are real angling books. Of no practical aid to the fisherman is the Reverend John Rawlinson’s sermon preached at Mercer’s Chapel in 1609. As shown by the title, Fishermen Fishers of Men, it is a spiritual analogy rather than a work on fishing. Yet it is a scarce and curious book; our copy is made particularly interesting by Shakespeare’s name forged about the year 1795 by William Henry Ireland, on the title page. Examples of this famous impostor’s work are now uncommon. This one is from the Heber collection.

From 1676, when the fifth edition of The Compleat Angler was published, seventy-four years passed before the book was reprinted by one Moses Brown, “at,”he says, “the instigation of an ingenious and learned friend” (who, it seems, was Dr. Samuel Johnson). Many other English fishing books came out, however, during the years when Walton was in eclipse. I have some of them in my collection. There is a sameness to the titles: The Angler’s Vade-Mecum, The Whole Art of Fishing, The Angler’s Sure Guide, The British Angler, The Compleat Fisherman.

Though their contents are not particularly entertaining, they occasionally convey some unusual information. We are told that “a young, vigorous, healthy stone-horse, who is in his prime, affords the strongest hair, and the most proper time for plucking his tail (from whence alone hair for making lines is to be taken) is when he goes to cover a mare.” For carving fish in the dish, appropriate terms are given. You chine a salmon, but you gobbet a trout or finn a chub. A bream is solayed; a pike splated; and a barbel tusked.

3

THE first American book on fishing was printed in 1743. Some four years earlier a Kingston, New Hampshire, minister named Joseph Seccombe, visited Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River for the early fishing. While there, during the Sabbath interlude, he preached a sermon in defense of the morality of fishing for pleasure. The title reads: Business and Diversion, Inoffensive to God and Necessary for the Comfort and Support of Human Society. The main subject he discussed was “Whether fishing is lawful as business or diversion.” The writer’s arguments are specious and his style is crude, but these are no blemishes in the estimation of the collector who is lucky enough to possess this cornerstone of an American angling library.

Unfortunately Seccombe omits details of the Amoskeag fishing, but as salmon then abounded in the Merrimack River, we know that the sport was royal. It brought to the river from faraway Portsmouth gentry who fished from the steep banks, while the Scotch settlers of the near-by towns of Derry, Bedford, and Goffstown gathered to catch the fish and salt them down for winter use. The Penacook Indians also assembled there to glut their winter-starved appetites. It was a motley gathering. Besides the salmon the waters swarmed with shad, alewives, and lampreys, often called eels. The lampreys were indeed a staple food in the vicinity, and a descendant, picturing the times, wrote these humorous lines concerning his ancestors’ fishing manners: —

The pamphlet in which the Reverend Joseph Seccombe’s discourse was published after a delay of four years is the earliest American work on any sport. It is now rare, although copies occasionally turn up around Boston. If anyone can suggest a possible author of the verses (signed “I. W.”) on the title page, I shall be very grateful to him.

From the publication of Seccombe’s Amoskeag fishing sermon in 1743 there is a gap of eighty-seven years before the next American book relating to fishing appeared. Milnor’s Historical Memoir of the Schuylkill Fishing Company came out in 1830. It chronicles the doings of that famous and exclusive organization from its inception in 1732. Possibly because there is added to the volume the history of the Gloucester, New Jersey, Fox Hunt, the book sells for a high price. The copy I have is not in the original boards. It has suffered somewhat at the hands of a late binder, but some photographs taken in the 1870’s, which show several of the solid citizens of the State variously occupied in preparing and consuming food in their traditional manner, have been inserted at the end of the book and compensate for its cropped edges.

In 1833 an unpretentious work on Massachusetts fish was published in Poston, with a second part, which bears the title “On trout, interspersed with remarks on the theory and practice of angling.” Dr. Jerome V. C. Smith was the author. My example is from the library of Daniel Webster, to whom it was given by Isaac P. Davis of Plymouth. Smith describes in some detail the Cape Cod fishing and has some interesting matter concerning the Mashpee River.

The American Angler’s Guide, the first book in this country to deal with the subject of recreational fishing in a comprehensive way, followed the first edition of Smith’s essay on angling by twelve years. Excepting an Angler s Almanac, which he published for three years, this was John J. Brown’s only work. In its day it was a useful manual and seven editions were published, all of which I have. The last, issued long after it had been superseded by other works on fishing, came out in 1876, capitalizing by a “Centennial edition” the events of that anniversary year of American independence.

“Unique” is not a word which may correctly be applied to any book unless one knows the history of any other copies which were printed. The best that can usually be said where full information does not exist is “no other copy known” (to the owner, of course). It is with some reservation therefore that I use this expression in connection with an early edition of a book simply but beautifully printed by Charles Whittingham for William Pickering in 1847. It is an anonymous publication, of which the title reads, The River Dove, With some quiet thoughts on the happy practice of angling. On the whole, I think it the most satisfactory piece of typography of the period. It is written in the familiar dialogue style of The Compleat Angler and is a kind of tribute to that book. The author, John Lavincount Anderdon, was an early friend and the brother-in-law of Cardinal Manning. Besides the published edition there was a privately printed issue, without printer’s name or date, in 1845, of which twenty-five copies were printed. One is in the Fearing collection.

A few years ago I came across this book in a dealer’s catalogue where the date was given as 1835 instead of 1845. The cataloguer called attention to the supposed error of the bibliographers in assigning the latter date to the work. As I did not have the book I ordered it. When it arrived I compared it with the Fearing copy dated 1845 and was pleased to find that it was a different book — in date, form, and contents. It was, in fact, an earlier edition of the work, which had hitherto escaped notice.

There was a good reason for this. A cryptic memoranda on an end leaf explains its scarcity. The first note reads: “Printed in 1835. From the kind author. Only six printed, of which only four were in perfect state, this being one of them.” The next, “1843. Three perfect copies only now remain including this.” And finally, “1845. I have reason to think that this is the only perfect copy now remaining.”

An inscription on the front flyleaf of this book reads, “Oliver Anderdon from John L. Anderdon, 1835.”

4

I HAVE also a selection of association books. Such books in my collection include the names of Louis Agassiz, John Buchan, Austin Dobson, Eugene Field, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Gosden, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frank Forester, Robert Hoe, G. A. Henty, John Major, Bliss Perry, William H. Prescott, W. C. Prime, William Pickering, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, Annie Trumbull Slosson, Bradford Torrey, Samuel J. Tilden, Henry van Dyke, Izaak Walton, and Daniel Webster. The volume which has Emerson’s autograph is the first of a pretty two-volume Chiswick Press edition I bought nearly twenty-five years ago in a town south of Boston. Its companion volume appears to have separated from it for many years, but by a remarkable coincidence, about fifteen years after I bought the first, the second turned up in a town nearly a hundred miles away.

The copy of The Compleat Angler edited by Austin Dobson and by him presented to Edmund Gosse contains a delightful inscription which I shall quote, although it has been printed before:—

To E. G.

Although presentation copies of Walton’s Lives are not uncommon, I do not have one, since it is not an angling book; yet for mere association’s sake I have added to my collection a book on a religious subject from his library with his autograph, As for The Compleat Angler, copies inscribed by the author are very scarce. I have the fifth edition with a presentation inscription, although the writing is not in Walton’s hand. It reads, “From Isaac Walton, to Miss Jane Markland.” To understand the association interest of this book we must first please bear in mind that on Walton’s will, signed in 1676 (the year this book was published), there were three witnesses. The names are Thomas Crawley, Joseph Taylor, Abraham Markland. Only Crawley and Markland, however, come into this story. Markland was Prebendary of Winchester Cathedral and it would seem likely that he had something to do with this volume — although Jane was neither his wife nor his child. I hope sometime to find a Markland genealogy which will show the connection.

When or how this book left the Markland family is unknown, but a note by Henry H. Gibbs (Lord Aldenham), written perhaps about 1870, on the flyleaf states that he bought it from Flaxley Abbey. This note introduces us to the Crawley family, whose descendant lived at Flaxley Abbey when Gibbs bought the book. In 1819 Sir Thomas Crawley Boevey pasted his armorial bookplate inside the front cover and incised his initials and date on its upper edge. It was this Sir Thomas whose greatgrandfather, together with Abraham Markland, witnessed Walton’s will!

This ends association number 2. The third association is even more interesting, though touching Walton not at all. The account is rather involved, but I shall try to make it clear.

Thomas Crawley (the second son of the witness to Walton’s will) had a cousin, William Boevey. William had a wife, Catherine, who, dying in 1726, bequeathed Flaxley Abbey to her husband’s cousin, whereon Thomas assumed the family name of Boevey. It is Catherine now on whom we should keep our eye, for she was beautiful and she had a romantic history. Her connection with a famous fictional character is family tradition, but accepted as authentic by literary historians. Married at fifteen and widowed at twenty-two, Mrs. Boevey’s hand was sought in vain by eligible bachelors of Gloucestershire. Steele, sketching her portrait, said of her, “Her speech is music, her form angelic.” Turn to the one hundred and thirteenth number of the Spectator for the melancholy story in which Steele records that this “perverse widow” rejected an offer of marriage from Sir Roger de Coverley!

5

ONE of my books is an unusual example of an early fly-fisher’s pocketbook. It is a dumpy octavo volume, bound in red leather with silver clasp, and the lettering on the cover shows it to have been the property of a Mr. Davidson, Chancery Lane, London — an expert angler. It has green vellum inside flaps which enclose thick pockets, front and back, wherein various angling souvenirs are preserved. The leaves are of parchment, some of them divided into six compartments, each being made into a thin envelope to enclose materials for use in making flies, the names of the flies being written on each compartment. On other pages there are delicately drawn representations of angling tackle in black and white and a few finely colored rural scenes and figures of fish. There are also manuscript notes concerning angling. Loose in the pockets are various memoranda, the most interesting being one which encloses part of the jawbone of an extraordinary trout. The account given of this fish reads thus: —

“The bone which is enclosed is that of a Trout which weighed 13 lb. 2 oz., measured 27 inches in length, 32 inches round the girth, being broader than it was long, was more like a Bream than a Trout, it was landed by Mr. Davidson upon the first Lock on the Thames at Maidenhead accompanied by Mr. Chevalier Boaz, who was by far the first Angler with a Minnow or Bleack ever known, he was so quick with his hand that nothing escaped him — This was taken by a middling sized Bleack one inch and a half long, it had been fished for with Nets in vain one or two years by the common Fishermen in hopes of having a good sale for it, which they would have had as they seldom fished for it ‘till they knew they could sell it in London for half a guinea a pound. Mr. Davidson left Mr. Boaz & returned to London & invited ten Gentlemen to dine next day upon it, many curious men saw it & declared they never saw so singular a Fish as it was a real Trout marked by its fan tail all Salmon being forked — he remembers the present Sir Alan Chambre sat on his right hand Mr. Jacob Wilkinson the East Indian Director on his left, when it was cut into, it proved not worth a farthing being milk white a very old Fish. According to promise Mr. Davidson returned next day to his Companion & walked to the rise of the Thames, for the purpose of gaining a complete knowledge of that kind of angling & fished every Lock, in the course of which he killed 8 or 10 very fine Trout none less than 6 lb weight & returned to his business in town in the course of a week, never having lamented his absence making pleasure always secondary to business.”

This document is dated from Newcastle, May, 1811.

I should like to end with a document which I received a few summers ago. It is signed by Mr. T. M. Gaithright, who invited me to visit his extensive game preserve in Virginia: —

Permission is hereby granted Mr. Charles E. Goodspeed to fish in my seventeen and one-half miles of Jackson River for all days during the 1940 bass season, upon the conditions stated below.

1. All State laws or rules prescribed by State department of Game and Inland Fisheries must be complied with strictly.

2. This permit as well as your hunting license, must be carried on your person and exhibited to any officer of the law, or caretaker on the Gaithright properties.

3. Unless you are an enthusiastic supporter of our distinguished Virginia statesmen, Senators Harry F. Byrd and Carter Glass in their effort to save our nation from disaster, then I do not want my river polluted with your damn fishing tackle.