Books and Manuscripts

Walton, Izaak, and Charles Cotton
The Complete Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation Being a Discourse of Rivers Fish-Ponds Fish and Fishing
London: William Pickering, 1836. In two volumes. First Nicolas edition, large paper edition. From the sporting library of American adventurer, naturalist, and sportsman, Brooke Dolan II. 4to. (xvi), cxl, (vii), cxlvi-clxiv, (iv), (clxv)-ccxii, (ii), 129; (iv), (131)-436, (32) pp. Edited by Sir Harris Nicolas. Title-pages printed in red and in black. Profusely illustrated with engraved full-page plates and in-text engravings and head- and tail-pieces, all on India paper. Contemporary three-quarter brown pebbled morocco over marbled paper-covered boards, stamped in gilt, extremities, joints, and boards rubbed, corners and spine ends lightly worn; top edges gilt, other edges trimmed; matching marbled endpapers, scattered light foxing to text in each volume; foxing in fore-edge, pp. 59-74 in first volume. Coigney 44; Horne 43; Westwood & Satchell, pp. 228-229

A handsome copy of the first Nicolas edition of Walton's The Complete Angler, one of the finest illustrated editions of his work ever produced. 

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.