OGDEN ON FLY TYING, ETC. [By James Ogden.]

1879 1st edition. Small 8vo (132 x 183mm). iv pp + iv p + 89 pp. Illustrated with 2 tipped-in albumen plates (one a frontispiece portrait of the author), 2 lithographs and 2 steel engravings. Errata leaf tipped-in. Dark green cloth, upper board titled in gilt, decorations in black.

This book is a small milestone in the history of flyfishing, almost certainly produced by James Ogden himself. Ogden fished with his father in Derbyshire, later coming south to Cheltenham where he perfected a practical method of dry-fly fishing. In this trail-blazing book he proposes the separation between any-method fishing and flyfishing. The hub of this book is the description of Ogden's method with the floating fly, which he claims to have invented 40 years before his book was published.