The Borders and Beyond - Abel Chapman

1924 - Gurney and Jackson, London - First Edition
A bright copy of this informative work of field exploration and natural history in Northumberland and the Anglo-Scottish borderlands.

Hunter-naturalist Chapman includes chapters on the British red grouse, the wildfowl of the north east coast, a search for the ‘moorland nymph’, salmonology, seagulls, woodcocks and herons, ravens, and the otter, together with a commentary on ‘modern zoology’, and extensive particulars on the migrations and plumage-phases in certain waders, to which he gave the name ‘Globe-Spanners’.

Profusely illustrated throughout with seventeen wonderful colour illustrations (on fourteen plates) by W.H. Riddell, twenty one black and white plates, two folding maps, and 170 sketches by the author.
 
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Price HK$ 1,000



A River Runs Through It and Other Stories - Norman Maclean

1976 - The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London - First Edition
‘In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing’

A freshly landed first edition of Maclean’s beautiful first book and the first work of fiction to be published by the University of Chicago Press, where he had been a professor for many years. Maclean had told versions of these stories, over the years, to a number of people who encouraged him, finally, to write them down at the age of eighty.

We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen. 
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Price HK$ 19,000



The Poetry of Sport - Hedley Peek (editor)

1896 - Longmans, London and Bombay - First Edition
‘Haste, ranger, to the Athol mountains blue! Unleash the hounds, and let the bugles sing! The thousand traces in the morning dew, the bounding deer,the black-cock on the wing, bespeak the rout of Scotland’s gallant king...from cairn of Bruar to the dark Glen-Morre, the forest’s in a howl, and all is wild uproar!’

A handsomely bound edition, with a distinctly Glaswegian accent, being bound in Glasgow and owned by the renowned medical Professor David Fyfe Anderson.

Containing a chapter on classical allusions to sport by Andrew Lang, and a lively preface to the Badminton Library by A.E.T Watson. Accompanied with illustrations by artists A. Thorburn, Lucien Davis, and C.E Brock, among others, this is a lovely compilation of poetry on the subject of sport for young men in the late eighteen-hundreds, primarily depicting activities such as fishing, hunting, and shooting.
 
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Price HK$ 2,000



1861 - Henry G. Bohn, London - The Second Jesse Edition
A finely bound copy of one of the most profusely illustrated editions, the second to be edited by Edward Jesse. According to Oliver, ‘this edition has been criticized as having been somewhat too fully annotated and illustrated, but the illustrations, in our opinion, add as much to the charm of the book, as the notes do to its interest’.

‘Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries,
" Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did ";
and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling
.’

The most enduring distinction of the
Complete Angler is the one cast off by its subtitle The Contemplative Man's Recreation with its graceful evocations of a life free from hurly-burly in the company of friends intent on physical and moral sustenance. The range of perspectives that Walton brings to bear on his rural descriptions embrace literature, poetry, music and anecdote. 
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Price HK$ 9,500



The Life of Izaak Walton; including Notices of his Contemporaries - Thomas Zouch

1826 - Thomas Gosden, London - First Gosden Edition
A charmingly bound Gosden edition of Zouch’s ‘Life of Izaak Walton’, first published in 1790, and later illustrated here with eighteen engraved plates which where also used for Thomas Gosden’s 1822 edition of the ‘Compleat Angler’. 
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Price HK$ 2,000