Halcyon Days: The Nature of Trout Fishing and Fishermen

It's been said that a fly rod is a magic wand that transports us to some of nature's loveliest places, which may help explain why more books have been written about trout fishing than about any other outdoor subject. The nature of this magnificent obsession - and those who are obsessed - is the subject of Halcyon Days. Angling historian Bryn Hammond paints a lush portrait of trout fishing and trout fishers, aided by the best of half a millennium of writings on the subject. The list of contributors reads like a who's who of angling literature: John Atherton, Gerald Eades Bentley, Dame Juliana Berners, J. W. Dunne, Negley Farson, Richard Franck, Arnold Gingrich, Sir Edward Grey, Roderick Haig-Brown, Frederic Halford, Captain G. D. Hamilton, Vernon Hidy, John Waller Hills, John Alden Knight, George LaBranche, Ben Hur Lampman, James E. Leisenring, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, A. A. Luce, Nick Lyons, John McDonald, Norman Maclean, the Reverend J. J. Manley, Alfred W. Miller, Arthur Ransome, Morley Roberts, Odell Shepard, G. E. M. Skues, Robert Traver, Henry Van Dyke, Bernard Venables, Izaak Walton, and Leonard M. Wright, among others. In his wide-ranging examination of subjects as diverse as Cruelty in Angling and Exact Imitation in Artificial Flies, Hammond gives us the really choice bits with which the great banquet of angling literature is so ungenerously sprinkled, and sharpens our appetite for more.This book celebrates a world where the important thing - the only thing - is going trout fishing. As Robert Traver (The Anatomy of a Murder) so wisely said: "I fish not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun."