Eric Fitch Daglish, Spawning Trout, [1930]

Eric Fitch Daglish, an English artist, engraver, and author, illustrated his own works and those of others, including Izaak Walton and Henry David Thoreau.

Eric Fitch Daglish, The fly came back to me, [1930] 

Dust jacket from Fly Fishing, [1930]

"Thus, as the angler looks back he thinks less of individual captures and days than of the scenes in which he fished. The luxuriance of water meadows, animated by insect and bird and trout life, tender with the green and gay with the blossoms of early spring:  the nobleness and volume of great salmon rivers:  the exhilaration of looking at any salmon pool, great or small; the rich brownness of Highland water:  the wild openness of the treeless, trackless spaces which he has traversed in an explorer’s spirit of adventure to search likely water for sea trout:  now on one, now on another of these scenes an angler’s mind will dwell, as he thinks of fishing.  Special days and successes he will no doubt recall, but always with the remembrance and the mind’s vision of the scenes and the world in which he fished.  For, indeed, this does seem a separate world, a world of beauty and enjoyment."

Frontispiece of Angler's Almanac, 1949

Wilfred Gavin Brown, the author of My River and Some Other Waters published in 1947, describes his return to the fishing stream of his childhood after World War II. Angler’s Almanac recounts Brown’s observations of nature and his thoughts during peacetime while fishing that same river and other familiar rivers and lakes in England. Reginald Lionel Knowles, a book designer and illustrator, illustrated each of Brown’s books, and Knowles, along with his brothers Horace and Charles, worked as illustrators and designers for different British publishers during the 20th century.    

Dust jacket from Angler's Almanac, 1949

Title page of Angler's Almanac, 1949