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

Walton, Izaak, and Charles Cotton
The Complete Angler...
London: John Major, 1823. Two parts in one volume. First Major edition, large paper copy. 8vo. lx, 411, (1), (4, ads) pp. From the library of Sir David Salomons, 1st Baronet, and with his armorial book-plate on front paste-down. Edited by Richard Thomson and John Major. Illustrated with two engraved frontispiece portraits on India paper, of Walton and Cotton, 12 engraved plates on India paper, and numerous in-text engravings, initials, and head- and tail-pieces. Finely bound in full green morocco, ruled and lettered in gilt, and with gilt corner and spine ornaments of fish and tackle, spine browned; top edge gilt, other edges untrimmed; dentelle angling-themed ornaments; marbled endpapers; by Zaehnsdorf; scattered very light foxing to plates and text. From the sporting library of American adventurer, naturalist, and sportsman, Brooke Dolan II. Coigney 23; Westwood & Satchell, p. 225; Horne 23

A fine copy of the first John Major edition of Walton's The Complete Angler, handsomely bound by Zaehnsdorf in full green morocco with gilt fishing ornaments.

From the library of Sir David Salomons, 1st Baronet (1797-1873), a leading figure in the struggle for Jewish emancipation in the United Kingdom during the 19th century. Salomons served as the first Jewish Sheriff and Mayor of London, and was the first Jewish magistrate in England. He served as an MP representing Greenwich, first in 1851, “but refused to take the oath ‘on the true faith of a Christian,’ a proceeding which drew the attention of the whole country to the question of Jewish disabilities. Taking his seat in the House, he was ordered to withdraw after having been heard in defense of his unprecedented action, and was subsequently fined £500 for illegally voting. The Greenwich constituency which he represented, however, reelected him again and again; but it was not until the alteration of the Parliamentary oath in 1858, after many futile attempts, that he was enabled to take his seat without further demur in 1859, one year after Baron Lionel de Rothschild had taken his oath and his seat as M. P. for the city of London.” (Jewish Encyclopedia)

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.

Height: 8.25 in. X Width: 1.25 in.