Complete Angler or contemplative man's recreation with illustrations by James Thorpe.. This item is unavailable.Complete Angler or contemplative man's recreation with illustrations by James Thorpe.

4to, pp. xvi, 221, [1], with half-title, frontispiece portrait, and 20 colour illustrations by Thorpe; a very good copy in full green morocco by Bayntun-Riviere, covers gilt with a large stylised device of waterlilies and fish, spine gilt in six compartments, gilt dentelles, all edges gilt; a few light scuffs.A very attractive illustrated edition of Walton's classic fishing manual in a deluxe Bayntun binding.Walton (1593–1683) was a friend and biographer of Donne; his Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, 'was conceived as a dialogue between men travelling on foot who each represented a different recreation' (ODNB). 'The fishing manual . is suggestively but not sufficiently characterized by its epigraph from I Thessalonians: "Study to be quiet". Like the pastoral tradition of which it was a part, Walton's Angler reflected on a fractured world by celebrating (and recommending) an order characterized as both "natural" and vulnerable' (ibid.).