On Fishing. Brian Clarke

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       A Second-hand Book

      I ONCE met a man who told me he collected fishing books. He had 35,000, he said. Later – and maybe not surprisingly – I learned that he was well-known in collecting circles and that his library was one of the most valuable in the world. He had agents and scouts everywhere looking for rare volumes to buy. He kept some in his house in Washington, DC, but most of them were in vaults in a bank.

      Most of us are not like that and could not afford to be like that. Lots of us have a few titles, many of us have dozens, some have hundreds. But we do not collect on an industrial scale. We find our books ourselves, one by one. We find them in jumble sales and charity stores and little local auctions. We find them in tucked-away corners of second-hand book shops and we are tickled pink if we find something exceptional.

      That, anyway, is how it is for me. I found an exceptional book, once.

      NO SPORT has a finer literature than angling and no sport’s great works are more avidly sought.

      The market in second-hand and antiquarian angling books is immense and world-wide. Some dealers handle little or nothing else, their catalogues offering hundreds of titles and thousands of volumes. There are periodic auctions in London, New York, Paris and elsewhere. Prices regularly reach four figures, sometimes five depending, naturally, on an individual book’s significance, rarity and condition.

      In a small way, I dabble myself. I am not on the London–New York–Paris circuit. Like lots of others, I am at the ‘tenner, go-on-then, twenty’ end of the market. My haunts are second-hand book shops, ideally tucked away and dimly lit: the kinds of places where time stops and all sound fades; cocooned places where the world resolves to spines and titles, dates and editions; to the whisper of turned pages and the occasional creak from a bare floorboard in the room overhead.

      Everyone in such shops is hunting a bargain as he or she defines it, the angling collector’s equivalent of landing a whopper. I have landed one or two – only one or two – myself. One of them was a seemingly ordinary reprint of Sir Edward Grey’s classic Fly-Fishing. It is set to stand as prominently on my shelves as books of far greater historical importance and value.

      Viscount Grey of Fallodon was Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916 and the man who, shortly before the First World War, famously saw the lights going out across Europe. Grey published his sensitive insight to his fishing life, times and philosophies in 1899 and it has been much sought-after ever since. A nice first edition of Fly-Fishing would, at turn-of-millennium prices, have fetched £200-plus. The 1928 reprint I have just acquired cost less than a tenth of that.

      It seemed, as I reached it down from its tucked-away niche in the tucked-away little shop, just the kind of thing that would make a present for a friend. Then I noticed that it had a couple of dents on the cover and, on ends of the pages when the book was closed, a couple of faint red stains where water, presumably at some time splashed onto the cover, had run.

      I was on the point of rejecting it when the edge of something inside the back cover caught my eye. It was a cracked, yellow-and brown cutting from the Liverpool Daily Post dated Tuesday, August 29, 1933. The headline read ‘Sinking Yacht Rescue’ and then ‘Liverpool Men’s Thrilling Escape’.

      Beside the cutting there was an inscription, written in handwriting that was scarcely bigger than the print used in the book itself. I started to decipher it but my eye was drawn relentlessly back to the cutting and I began to read.

      It told how Mr A. McKie Reid, clearly a prominent Liverpool medical man, had set off on a sailing holiday with his friend Mr Leo Gradwell, a barrister. They had left Mostyn, in Wales, on the hired ketch Lalage, with two professional deckhands aboard. The plan was to sail up the west coast to Scotland but, in high winds and heavy seas in Caernarvon Bay, they found themselves in trouble. They used the engine for a time, then it broke down. Eventually finding themselves being driven towards the Skerries and with the seas running higher and higher, they made out to open water to run before the wind.

      McKie Reid told the Daily Post how, as darkness fell, the boat began to take in water and they had to bail continuously. Finally, after what must have been a terrifying night, a trawler was sighted. Someone on the Lalage managed to flash a lamp briefly and the vessel – itself far off its own intended course – turned towards them.

      Once alongside one another, the two boats rearing and plunging on the waves, McKie Reid made what he called ‘the biggest jump of my life. The two deckhands jumped next and Mr Gradwell made fast a towing line before he jumped. By this time the vessels had drifted apart and he nearly fell between them. About an hour after the trawler had taken the yacht in tow, it foundered. But for the trawler’s arrival, we should have been lost.’

      Dramatic stuff, all right – but why was the cutting here, in this fishing book? I flicked to the front and looked again at the name and address I had noticed written inside it: ‘A. McKie Reid, 86 Rodney Street, Liverpool.’ I turned back to the inscription alongside the cutting. Deciphered, it read: ‘This book was with me on the Lalage. I threw it inside a rucksack, on board the trawler, before the boats were near enough for me to jump.’ And then the initials ‘A. McKie R.’

      What I was holding in that shop – and what will now stay in my own collection instead of being passed on to someone else – was a book of little cash value yet one containing a text that generations of anglers have prized; a volume clearly so loved by its fly-fishing owner that in that dire, life-and-death situation, he took the time to grab it and hurl it to safety before jumping himself, even as the boat beneath his feet was making ready to go down.

      I closed the book, went to the counter and handed over the £15 that was being asked for it. It was a bargain to me, if not to anyone else: this collector’s whopper literally in the bag. I’d have been happy to pay twice the price for a book with that kind of history – and for the tell-tale water stains, extra.