BLACKER’S ART OF FLY MAKING Etc.,

Comprising Angling, & Dyeing of Colours, with Engravings of Salmon & Trout Flies shewing the Process of the Gentle Craft as taught in the pages..., with Descriptions of Flies for the Season of the Year as they come out on the Water, Rewritten & Revised by the Author Blacker, Himself, Fishing Tackle Maker of 54, Dean St. Soho, London, 1855

xi – 259 pages, small 8vo (170 x108 mm), hand coloured engraved frontispiece, 16 hand coloured engraved plates, engraved title page, text and plates decorated with floriated borders, full brown leather titled gilt on the upper cover with ticket of Jones Binder, George-Court, Piccadilly on the front paste-down endpaper. The leather is worn along all the edges, one section (pages 43-66) is lose, some pages towards the centre of the volume are creased, inscription in ink on the verso of the frontispiece, some light foxing but the delicately coloured plates, all with tissue guards, are unaffected. Lacks one coloured and two plain plates.

Catalogue of the library of the late John Gerard Heckscher. Part I, (New York 1909) : Angling; Library of the late John Gerard Heckscher of New York City, part 1, number 203, calls for twenty plates of flies of which eighteen are coloured.

Westwood & Satchell: Bibliotheca Piscatoria, London 1883, page 33, also calls for twenty plates of flies of which eighteen are coloured. This work was originally issued as Art of Angling in 1842. The work is a strange medley of practical usefulness and rhapsodical extravagance. The instructions for fly-making are peculiarly precise and clear. Some parts of the ‘Catechism’ follow the ‘Art of Angling’ word for word; others are dissimilar. The earlier editions have specimens of the flies wafered to the page.’