THE BOOK OF THE SALMON. By "EPHEMERA". Flyfisher's Classic Library de luxe edition.

(1850) 1995 new edition. 8vo (165 x 242mm). Ppxxvi,242. Eight full-page colour plates, five of them of salmon flies. Full burgundy goatskin with actual salmon fly set within a bespoke mount inside the front board.

One of 55 de luxe copies, each containing an actual salmon fly tied by Henrik Strandgaard. The Book of the Salmon (1850) is one of the best-known books on salmon fishing of the nineteenth century. It belongs to the exciting decade from 1842, which saw the publication of Blacker's first edition, Scrope's Days and Nights of Salmon Fishing and Jones's Guide to Norway, some of the most brilliant (and most desirable) of all fly-fishing books. 'Ephemera' was an Irishman, Edward Fitzgibbon. He was a friend of William Blacker, the celebrated tackle-dealer, and an excellent all-round angler of great experience. Unlike Blacker, Fitzgibbon could write, and he was an ambitious author. The Book of the Salmon is the first comprehensive guide to salmon fishing to be published. In addition, it contains five colour plates of flies and three plates of salmon fry, superbly engraved by the Adlards (the same men who produced the dazzling plates in Jones's Guide to Norway). Westwood and Satchell's Bibliotheca Piscatoria, (1883) comments, "the chapters on fly-making are unusually clear and comprehensible". The quality and rarity of Ephemera's book have made it a most sought after collector's piece which fetches (when it occasionally appears) a substantial price. It is an essential volume for anyone interested in the history of the salmon fly.