Books and Manuscripts

Allerton, R(euben) G.
Brook Trout Fishing. An Account of a Trip of the Oquossoc Angling Association to Northern Maine, in June, 1869
New York: Printed by Perris & Browne For the Publisher, R.G. Allerton, 1869. First edition. From the sporting library of American adventurer, naturalist, and sportsman, Brooke Dolan II. 12mo. (xii), 59, (2), (5, ads) pp. Illustrated with black and white plates and a folding hand-colored engraved plate. Publisher's royal blue cloth, lightly soiled, stamped in blind and in gilt; all edges trimmed; brown coated endpapers; book-plate of renowned American sport collector William Mitchell Van Winkle on front paste-down. Westwood and Satchel, p. 4

Handsome copy of this scarce work on trout fishing in Maine, with the often absent hand-colored folding brook trout engraving. 

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.