MY SPORTING LIFE. By John Waller Hills. Flyfisher's Classic Library edition.

(1936) 2000 new edition. 8vo (160 x 240mm). Ppx,298,ad. Sepia frontispiece photograph portrait. Full burnt-orange bonded leather, spine titled in gilt, FFCL logo to upper board, top edge gilt, printed marbled end-papers, silk marker, in cloth slipcase.

Chalk-stream trout fishing, Cumbrian salmon and trout, Scottish deer stalking. The tale Hills tells of his own education on Test, Itchen, Kennet, and Driffield Beck, and of his broad-minded resolution of North and South Country styles provides a valuable part of angling history. He also describes salmon fishing on the Dee, the Spey, and in Norway, and recollects hunting expeditions in places as diverse as Canada and Uruguay and even parts of the USA. But perhaps the most interesting part of the book contains extracts from his angling diaries. Hills' method was not the terse 'game book' form - he adopted the more ambitious way of writing a reasoned and self-critical account of each day's fishing. Raw material of this sort is extremely uncommon in the literature of fishing, and adds enormously to the interest of this book. Our edition contains an extremely well researched Introduction by Dr Tony Hayter about the life, career and fishing of Hills and a Foreword by Tom Fort who ends: 'All I can say is that - if you care anything for fish and rivers and wild places and good writing - [buying this book] will have been money well spent.'