Some old books on angling, especially first editions, are very rare and collectable and can fetch a very good price at auction but there were gasps of amazement at a recent book sale at Bonhams Auction House when all records were smashed out of sight.
Pre-auction interest had been centred on a 1651 edition of The Art of Angling by Thomas Barker and experts had put a valuation of £70,000 on the book which was the first book in English devoted to fishing and also to mention the reel and is one of only two existing copies of the book – the other is in a private library in New York.
The previous record for an angling book was the £50,000 which was paid some years ago for a 1651 edition of the Complete Angler by Izaac Walton.
Surprises
There were many other angling books up for sale at the auction which over the day raised over £650,000 and there were surprises when a copy of an 1843 edition of William Blacker’s book Catechism of Fly Making, Angling and Dyeing came on offer for speculation was that it would fetch around £4,000.
But then a bidding war started and the price went through the roof and ended when one of the bidders finally forked out £187,250 which is some 46 times the original estimate.
The Barker book went in the opposite direction and sold for less than the original estimate at £61,000. It just shows the interest in old books, for another one, a 1590 edition of A Booke of Fishing With Hook and Line brought a bid of £51,000.
The whole sale, which was named The Angling Library of Alan Jarvis, obviously a private collection, did raise as I mentioned earlier, a massive £650,000 and it makes me wonder what the couple of books by Leeds legend Jim Bazley that I own are worth!
* The European Coarse Fishing Championships will take place in Slovenia at the end of July and the Angling Trust have announced three further teams who will be taking part.
The first named was the under-23 team and this is: Matt Godfrey (Worksop), Matt Derry and Cameron Hughes (North Derry), Frankie Gioncelli (Brighouse) and James Dent (Cleveland).
The under-18s are: Jake Dye (Worksop), Luke Wazocek (Normanton), Mark Bennett (Hampshire), Sam Hughes (Coleford) and Mark Oliver (Hertford). The England veterans (over-60s) team will be fishing on Portugal’s River Mondego in August and will comprise of: Joe Roberts, Don Slaymaker, Dickie Carr, Roger Marcow and Terry Lancaster with Barnsley’s Dick Clegg (OBE/MBE) as manager.
* Despite the poor weather the figures for the Washburn Valley Fishery in May were quite good. A total of 152 anglers landed 687 fish with the best, a 6lb 7oz rainbow trout taken by R Grandage on a Bibio fly.
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