THE BOOK OF THE FLY ROD

Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. Good.. George Sheringham. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931. First edition. 11 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches: pp. xvi, 174. Green cloth, beveled edges with gold gilt lettering on spine.

Some spotting, fading on spine. Bottom corners bumped, evidence of which extend throughout the book, for the most part, faintly. Foxing on edges. Text is unmarked. Binding tight. Lacks slipcase, dust jacket.

Four lovely (tissue-guarded) colour-collotype plates of Salmon and Trout Flies; Salmonidae; Sea Fish; and Coarse Fish. Eight Black and White Woodcuts, as well as many smaller head- and tail-piece woodcuts throughout. Articles appear Henry Van Dyke, William Radcliffe, Arthur Ransome, Knut Dahl, W.L. Calderwood, Ferris Greenslet, F. Gray Griswold, John Cl Moore, H.D. Turing, Arthur F. Bell, Harry Plunket Greene, Sir Charles Holmes, Eric Parker, G.E.M. Skues. Hugh Tempest Sheringham, who died in mid-writing of this book, espoused this philosophy which the surviving editor, Mr. John C. Moore, notes:

"Hugh Sheringham had little sympathy with the plutocrat who (his own words) 'bestrides our streams like a Colossus.' He liked to think of the fly-rod as something all men equally could enjoy." In one of this books,

Sheringham opined concerning the "what and why" of grown men spending untold hours fishing: The artifice of fishing is displayed not only in the delusion of the fish, but to some extent in the delusion of the fisher also. Let him have the power of persuading himself that the boy in him has never grown up, or better, let it be so without his knowing it, and the world is his oyster..."