THE COMPLEAT ANGLER PART II: BEING INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO ANGLE FOR A TROUT OR GRAYLING IN A CLEAR STREAM. By Charles Cotton. With an afterword by John McDonald.

(1676) 1998 Timken edition. Square 8vo (186 x 209mm). Ppxx,55 + colophon. Chapter heading decorations, vignettes taken from the 1653 frontispiece of Walton's Compleat Angler. Paste paper covered boards by Claire Maziarczyk, green cloth spine with white paper label titled in green. Edition limited to 75 copies.

A scarce private-press book published in an edition of only 101 copies. Copies 1 to 75 were quarter-bound in cloth, copies A to Z were half-bound in leather. This is one of the cloth-bound copies". The idea of making a fine press edition of the Cotton discourse on fly-fishing arose when I purchased John McDonald's book Quill Gordon (1972) in which he offers a version of Part II of The Compleat Angler and in which he removes the dialogue between Piscator and Viator. By editing Walton out of Cotton, McDonald uncovered the first original treatise on fly-fishing. It is an honor to append a coda by John McDonald to this book. Cotton's dialogue serves primarily to set the scene in the first three chapters and while it offers a charming view of English country life in the seventeenth century, it does not contain any of the promised instructions for fly-fishing. These begin only in the fourth chapter. I have followed McDonald in eliminating Chapters I-III as well as Chapter XI and XII that pertain exclusively to fishing for trout with bait. Like McDonald, I have included the recipe for cooking trout. I have, however, not deleted the material that McDonald deemed obsolete, as it is my intention to preserve here all the text that pertains to fishing with a fly. Omissions are summarized in italics within the body of the text. Punctuation and spelling have been changed to conform to current usage. The letters between Cotton and Walton about Cotton's contribution were included in the 1676 edition, as they are here - with Cotton's at the beginning and Walton's at the end. The information about the life of Charles Cotton comes from George Washington Bethune, the editor of the first American edition of The Compleat Angler (1847), and Gerald G.P. Heywood, the author of Charles Cotton and His River (1928)". (From the preface by Jane Timken).