Books and Manuscripts

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

Franck, Richard
Northern Memoirs, Calculated for the Meridian of Scotland...
London: Printed for the Author. To be sold by Henry Mortclock, 1694. First edition. 8vo. xxxix, (i), 304 pp. From the sporting library of American adventurer, naturalist, and sportsman, Brooke Dolan II. Full contemporary brown calf, stamped in blind, rebacked, black morocco spine label, stamped in gilt, extremities and boards rubbed and worn; all edges trimmed; book-plate of angling collector Edwin F. Snow on front paste-down; ownership signature, dated 1766 on front blank, old lengthy inscription below same, “of extreme rarity…”; scattered light spotting to text; very small loss in top corner pp. 221/222; in brown straight-grain morocco lift-off case. Westwood & Satchell, p.100

Rare first edition of Richard Franck's part travel-memoir, part angling discourse, containing “curious particulars about the state of Scotland” (Walter Scott in the 1821 reprint). The book’s “main interest centers in the places which Franck visited in Scotland, and the account of them which he gives. His route was by Carlisle and Dumfries to Glasgow; thence to Stirling, Perth, Forfar, and Loch Ness; Sutherlandshire and Caithness, Cromarty, Aberdeen, Dundee, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, and Berwick, were next seen, and he made his way home by Morpeth. For anglers the book possesses great attraction. Franck is the first to describe salmon-fishing in Scotland, and both in that and trout-fishing with artificial fly he proves himself an excellent practical angler. His rules for fly-fishing, and especially for salmon-fishing, cannot be improved at present. Internal evidence shows that he had read the 'Compleat Angler;' indeed he tells us that he had argued with Walton at Stafford on the fact related by the latter of pickerel weed breeding pike, and that Walton laid it on Gesner and then 'huffed away.' Franck loses no opportunity of scoffing at him. He incidentally mentions Nottingham as being even in his time the nursery of many good anglers, describes their famous 'pith bait' and the breeding of salmon, and commends the dressing of a fly which could not be improved upon at the present day. He is the first angler to name that curious fish of the Trent, the burbot, and highly commends the salmon of the Thames, especially those caught below bridge.” (DNB)

The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first printed usage of the proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention” to this edition. 

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.