[Fishing] Walton, Izaak, and Charles Cotton: The Complete Angler...

Walton, Izaak, and Charles Cotton
The Complete Angler: Or, Contemplative Man's Recreation. Being a Discourse on Rivers, Fish-Ponds, Fish, and Fishing. In Two Parts…
London: Printed only for Thomas Hope; sold by him and Sackville Parker, Richard Matthews, and Samuel Trimmer, 1760. Two parts in one volume. First Hawkins Edition. 8vo. lvi, xxii, 303, (1); xlviii, iv, ii, iv, 128, (viii). From the sporting library of American adventurer, naturalist, and sportsman, Brooke Dolan II. Edited by John Hawkins. Illustrated with two engraved frontispieces, 14 engraved plates, 17 in-text engravings of fish, and several wood-cut or engraved head- and tail-pieces and initials. Full contemporary speckled tan calf, black morocco spine label, upper front joint cracked, boards and extremities rubbed; all edges trimmed; scattered light spotting to text; in brown cloth box, “Brooke Dolan 1940” stamped in gilt on front panel. Coigney 9; Horne 9; Westwood & Satchel, p. 221

Lot includes the second Hawkins edition (London, 1766), bound in full 19th-century paneled brown calf, elaborately stamped in blind and in gilt. Also from Dolan's library.

Brooke Dolan II (1908-45) was an American adventurer, naturalist, sportsman, and book collector. Educated at Harvard University and Princeton University, he later became a trustee of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. During the 1930s he led two notable expeditions to China and Tibet, collecting numerous specimens that he sent back for the Academy's collection. In 1942, during World War II, he was recruited to serve in the OSS (precursor of the CIA) and traveled to Lhasa with Ilya Tolstoy (grandson of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy), searching for supply routes to China for the Allied Forces. During this time they established contact with the Tibetan government and met the seven-year-old 14th Dalai Lama--the first Americans to ever do so. He then joined the Army Air Forces, and the United States Military Observer Group in Western China, behind Japanese lines near Mao’s headquarters. He died in 1945.