Books and Manuscripts

(Walton, Izaak)
The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative man's Recreation. Being a Discourse of Rivers, Fish-ponds, Fish and Fishing. To which is added The Laws of Angling: with a new Table of the Particulars in this Book
London: Printed by J.G. for Rich. Marriot, 1661. The third Edition much enlarged. Small 8vo. (xvi), 255, (17) pp. From the sporting library of American adventurer, naturalist, and sportsman, Brooke Dolan II, in his custom cloth box. Illustrated with 10 in-text engravings of fish (trout, pike, carp, tench, perch, barbel, bream, eel, loach, and bullhead), and two pages of engraved sheet music for “The Anglers Song” by Henry Lawes. Full green pebbled morocco, stamped in gilt; all edges gilt; by Riviere & Son; light dampstaining in lower fore-edge of some leaves at front; in brown cloth box, stamped in gilt “Brooke Dolan 1940” on front panel. Coigney 3; Pforzheimer 1050; Horne 3; Westwood & Satchel, pp. 218-219

A lovely copy of the third edition of Walton's classic. 

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.