‘I will conclude with what I consider my favourite angling book. The following may sound strange when I have quite a few angling classics that it is in competition with. I found this book one day many years ago when scouring a local library that was having a sale’
I would imagine that most anglers like to have a few, perhaps an entire library of, books about their preferred pastime, probably more so among those of us with a bent toward vintage tackles, and among those with a glassy-eyed fondness for the days past when the world was much quieter and there was more green. So, what titles grace your shelves?
I started to pen this piece after having a critical look at my own motley collection. Yes I have the usual The Compleat angler by Walton and Cotton (in fact I have no less than three editions), also the old standby volumes from ‘BB’ which so many love. Then,moving forward in time, there are Venables offerings and many smaller books by lesser known authors.
Sitting prettily amongst these there are a few Chris Yates books, all in the good company of Tony Miles, Trefor West, Maurice Pledger, Tom Quinn, Fred J Taylor, Colin Willock, John Bailey,our very own Martin James, plus several others.
I have a section of the bookshelves set aside for what I could call coffee table offerings which have been purchased for me as gifts by family members over many years. Sadly, I am the only angler in the family and there were some who thought they were on the right track by buying me books such as The Hamlyn Encyclopedia of Angling, or quite a few of John Wilson’s books. Whilst they seem well written and full of photos, these are not quite my cup of tea. There are also ‘How to catch’ books, which I suppose could have had held interest for me many years ago but which now sit forlornly among many similar tomes; never read and never looked at but I do not have the heart to dispose of them as some are actually quite old and were gifts from my parents, or other family members.
Now I may not be alone in the following, being as I am not just interested in vintage tackle. I also am a great lover of sea angling and have been for as long as I can remember. I have quite a lot of books by such authors as Hugh Stoker, Mike Ladle, Trevor Housby John Holden; all accomplished sea anglers in their own right. There are also other titles by authors lesser known.
One branch of freshwater angling I have tried a few times is the gentle art of flicking a fly into a bubbling stream, large reservoir, river or day ticket venue. I have to say I am quite the most inept fly fisherman ever, having ‘all the gear and no idea’. Unless fly fishing is included amongst my coffee-table editions, there are no other books relating to freshwater fly fishing in my collection.
However, I do on occasion like to flick a flashily adorned hook on the end of a shooting-head into a tidal flow where maybe a bass or pollack may be lurking and, as such, I have the odd volume relating to that particular aspect of sea angling. I also like to wander around rocky shorelines ‘chucking’ lures into likely looking areas in search of, again, bass. Titles relating to salt-water lure angling are included in my collection, again by Mike Ladle.
Moving on, I should mention that when out and about I am frequently drawn to charity shops, where there are always bookshelves full mostly with titles that hold no interest in at all but I am like a fly to a jam-pot when searching for maybe that one book which would make all the time spent scouring the shelves worthwhile.
I will conclude with what I consider my favourite angling book. The following may sound strange when I have quite a few angling classics that it is in competition with. I found this book one day many years ago when scouring a local library that was having a sale of books/titles that were either not in a fit state for lending out or had ceased to be popular.
This is the book, unremarkable as it is, and it would probably be given barely a glance these days. Published in 1967 and costing a healthy thirty shillings when new, which these days equates to between £35 to £40, it is titled “Successful Shore Fishing” by Anthony Pearson, a journalist for local and national newspapers. He also contributed articles to the magazines “Creel” and “Trout and Salmon“. My copy of this book is somewhat the worse for wear, with well-thumbed pages and the corners of the dust jacket are showing their age. Somebody had torn out half of the frontispiece picture before I purchased it and some of the pages are tad loose. I like this book on so many levels. It is well, if plainly, written, and covers many venues on the UK coastline, a few of which I have fished myself. It has quite a lot of good quality black-and-white photographs and the most interesting thing, to me at least, is that it shows what a prolific and interesting shoreline the UK used to have, where cod, haddock and bass etc were not creatures of mystery as they are these days as a result of overfishing and probably pollution also.
I do like this book a lot! So, I conclude by asking “What is your favourite angling book?”
Writing & Image – David Craine, The Wolds Winter 2026
You must be logged in to post a comment.