ANGLING BOOKS

 

      I suppose the title 'Angling Books' is slightly more alluring than 'Books About Fishing', and I am sure that the number of readers likely to be lured by either title is rather small. Given the 'long tail' principle, however, perhaps this post will be snagged by someone casting from way out there who is interested in the subject. Especially if I bait the post with words like 'piscatorial', 'ichthyology', 'salmon', 'whales', 'sharks' and throw in some additional chum by mentioning the movie 'Jaws'.
     Books about angling are often beautiful and very valuable and generally are pursued  more avidly by book collectors than by those who actually fish. Sometimes such collections are donated to libraries, much to the chagrin of the librarians and administrators of libraries who would rather have the money than the information such books contain. Just a few years ago, a collection valued at almost $2 million was given to Washington State University (see: "Classic Angling Books Featured in 1.8 Million Gift to WSU," Rich Landers, The Spokesman-Review, August 31, 2011).
     I will mention some major collections below which are held by university libraries and direct you to some information about them. My main purpose, however, is to introduce you to a collection about which not much is known. It is The Gregory Clark Piscatorial Collection located in the Archives and Special Collections at Western University.

Selected Piscatorial Collections

          

     Since this post is about the collection held at Western University and since the collections elsewhere are well-described this will be brief.

Harvard University

     Harvard has a whale of a collection and it even has a huge collection of bookplates about angling. The basis for the collection was a donation by Daniel B. Fearing back in 1918. It looks as though the collection has been dispersed and much is probably in storage. See: "Fearing Library Given to Harvard," Christian Science Monitor, July 19, 1918; "Harvard's 21, 800 Books About Fishing," Ronald Kriss, Boston Globe, Mar. 28, 1954 and "New Collection for Widener: D.B. Fearing '82 Willed His Entire Library to University, Harvard Crimson, Sept. 24, 1918. The Fearing Bookplates are found in the Houghton Library Bookplate Collection.

Princeton University
     For information about how Princeton became a "repository for one of the finest angling collections in the world" see: "Angling Books", J.I. Merritt, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol.41, No.1, Autumn, 1979, p.30. (Available via JSTOR).

   In Canada, there are good collections at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia.

The University of Alberta 

Bruce P. Dancik Collection of Angling Books

“The Dancik Collection consists of more than 3,000 books and an equal number of ephemeral publications. Many are titles of extreme rarity, often illustrated with woodcuts, copper or steel engravings, chromolithographs, and photo engravings. Beyond documenting the history and practice of angling, the collection is a significant research resource for freshwater biologists, limnologists, and ichthyologists, and for the study of ecology and wildlife resource management.”

The collection was featured in an exhibition “A Contemplative Angler”.

A story about the award-winning catalogue for the exhibition is found in the University of Alberta publication Folio March 1, 2019 “Fish Stories: Rare Collection of Angling Lore Featured in Popular U of A Exhibit”.

The University of British Columbia

The Harry Hawthorn Foundation Collection

"The Library of the University of British Columbia has an excellent collection of books on angling and fly-fishing, known as the Harry Hawthorn Collection. At present it totals more than 2200 books, including many rare and valuable items. This Collection came about as the result of a fishing holiday in 1953 by eight UBC professors and Roderick Haig-Brown at Upper Campbell Lake."

See also: A Brief History of the Harry Hawthorn Foundation. A bibliography relating to this collection is found among the books in the Clark Collection described below. See the entry for: The Contemplative Man's Recreation....

   For additional angling collections see:  Backcasts: A Global History of Fly Fishing and Conservation, edited by Samuel Snyder, Bryon Borgelt, Elizabeth Tobey.
See the: "Appendix: Research Resources: A List of Libraries, Museums, and Collections Covering Sporting History, Especially Fly Fishing”. p.317. Additional details are available at the publisher, the University of Chicago Press.

The Gregory Clark Piscatorial Collection

   This collection of angling books is held in the Archives and Special Collections at Western University. At this time (c2019) there does not appear to be any information about the Gregory Collection provided by the Western Libraries (or I could not find any). My purpose here is to provide some. I have assembled the information and am alone responsible for it.

     For additional details, I have attached the following pdf file: The Gregory Clark Piscatorial Collection. (50+pp)