BIBLIOTHECA PISCATORIA A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS ON ANGLING, THE FISHERIES WITH Bibliographical Motes and an Appendir OF Citations touching on angling and fishing from PREFACE. THE first edition of this list appeared in 1861, under the auspices of the Field newspaper. A supplement was added in 1869 from the same source. Since the latter date, the work has remained in abeyance, the edition having been exhausted. Though chargeable with many shortcomings the "New Bibliotheca Piscatoria" was, numerically, at least, an important advance on its predecessors. For bibliographical uses it may be well to recapitulate here who were those predecessors and what their value and importance. The earliest printed list of angling books was compiled by Mr., afterwards Sir Henry Ellis. It appeared in 1811, as a contribution to Sir Egerton Brydges' "Bibliographer," and a few copies were afterwards issued in a separate form. It consisted of eighty works, and furnished some scanty biographical notices of their authors. This list was afterwards extended to one hundred and eighty entries, in a revised issue, appended by Mr. Wm. Pickering, to Boosey's "Piscatorial Reminiscences," in 1836. Four years later, Mr. James Wilson appended "An abbreviated list of one hundred works on Halieuticks" to his sporting treatise, "The rod and the gun," which treatise, as well as the list in an abbreviated form, had been originally printed in the 7th edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica," and, in an enlarged form, in the 8th edition of that work. This was followed, in 1847, by the "Waltonian Library" of Dr. Bethune, the able, erudite and sympathetic editor of the American edition of "The Complete Angler," in which publication it figured as an appendix. It contained about three hundred entries. Finally, in 1856, appeared the "Bibliographical Catalogue" of Mr. J. Russell Smith, given as a sequel to Mr. Robert Blakey's "Angling literature of all nations," and of which, as we have elsewhere stated, it may be said to have formed the most valuable feature. This contains two hundred and sixty-four works on angling. |