ARTHUR RANSOME ON FISHING. By Jeremy Swift.

1994 1st edition. De luxe issue. Pp280. B/w photographs, illustrations. Bound in full leather, gilt, silk marker. Specially bound edition limited to 250 copies.

Arthur Ransome began to fish as a boy in the Lake District, but the pursuit became almost an obsession when he lived in Russia during World War I and reported the Revolution and its aftermath for The Daily News and The Manchester Guardian. When he returned to England with Trotsky's secretary as his wife, he settled in Lakeland and began his four-year weekly column, Rod and Line, for The Guardian, stopping only to write the twelve Swallows and Amazon, books for children which made him famous. Although he published a few of these and other fishing essays in two books, Rod and Line and Mainly about Fishing, most of his writing and broadcasting on the subject has never appeared in book form. This volume not only tells of Ransome's fishing adventures - in exotic places with men of history, or by small English streams with unknown, eccentric compatriots - but it rescues many of Ransome's fishing articles from the oblivion of the archive shelf. Jeremy Swift has compiled an angling biography of Ransome illustrated with photographs and including essays from his Guardian column which were not included in Rod and Line. In the new introduction of FFCL's edition of The Fisherman's Library, Tom Fort writes: "He is, simply, an outstanding writer in English; witty, ironic, devoid of pretentiousness, a master of the telling descriptive phrase..." Edition limited to 250 numbered copies, signed by Jeremy Swift.