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How To Get The World's Most Expensive Fishing Book for Free

By Editor 30/05/2012 13:37:00

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How To Get The World's Most Expensive Fishing Book for Free

A Victorian book on fly fishing became what is believed to be the most expensive angling book ever sold at auction when it went under the hammer at Bonhams earlier this week as a lot in sale of the Angling Library of Alan Jarvis.

‘Catechism of Fly Making, Angling and Dyeing, Comprising Most Essential Information’ was written by William Blacker and published in 1842. The volume realised £187,250 and is an expanded edition of 130 pages dating from 1843 and included over 75 flies and fly-tying specimens mounted with silver seals on four sheets of thick card.

William Blacker was a London dealer in fishing tackle from his shop in Soho and a famous angler in his own right. His methods were seen as revolutionary at the time and the book has long been regarded as a key work in the history of fly fishing.

Elsewhere in the sale a first edition of Thomas Barker’s ‘The Art of Angling’ (1651) made £61,250 and Markus-Eliezer Bloch’s beautifully illustrated ‘Natural History of Fish’ sold for £51,650.

How to get this book for free!

The good news is that this book has been made available to the public an an ebook as part of what is called 'Project Gutenberg'

Just click here!

Will any of the modern ‘classics’ realise such high prices in the future? If so which ones? Let us have your thoughts and comments!

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Comments (7 posted):

s fontinalis on 30/05/2012 14:16:58

Nice link, but this book has been free for a long time, and in multiple fomats including PDF from archive.org, along with many of the other classics by Kelson, Pryce-Tannatt, Maxwell, Francis, Hardy, Knox among others. All are copyright free as the copyrights have expired.

Hardyreels on 30/05/2012 17:38:27

Thank you for that Paul, While what Eunan has pointed out may be true I for one was not aware of these historic editions being available to me via a click of the mouse. I have already saved the link to my browser favorits. Your continued support of our forum here through such informative postings does not go unnoticed here in Alaska :shades: Bravo, Ard

s fontinalis on 30/05/2012 17:46:37

Let me rephrase what i said. Thanks for the link. If anyone is interested in other classics, they are available at archive.org. Just search the name of the book you are interested in

Kerry Pitt on 05/06/2012 16:02:56

I echo Ard's sentiments. It is great to have this pointed out and I also appreciate the information from s fontinalis.

Pocono on 06/06/2012 10:21:46

Very nice! I've known about the links to the other classic books that have been mentioned and posted some of them when we did the Salmon Fly Tie-Along back in 2010. Interesting that this book should come from the library of "Alan Jarvis"; particularly when I am "Allan Jarvis"! Pocono

littledavid123 on 07/06/2012 13:54:31

THANK YOU SIR A wonderful site, both my daughter (14) and I will be spending time there reading books. Dave

JoJer on 08/06/2012 17:04:24

Small world: When I went to the link to save it for later, I saw the Gutenberg name and realized I already have the link saved from researching duck hunting info.

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