PREFACE. 



THE first edition of this list appeared in 1861, under the 

 auspices of the Field newspaper. A supplement was added in 

 1869 from the same source. Since the latter date, the work has 

 remained in abeyance, the edition having been exhausted. 



Though chargeable with many shortcomings the " New 

 Bibliotheca Piscatoria " was, numerically, at least, an important 

 advance on its predecessors. For bibliographical uses it may 

 be well to recapitulate here who were those predecessors and 

 what their value and importance. 



The earliest printed list of angling books was compiled by 

 Mr., afterwards Sir Henry Ellis. It appeared in 1811, as a con- 

 tribution to Sir Egerton Brydges' u Bibliographer," and a few 

 copies were afterwards issued in a separate form. It consisted 

 of eighty works, and furnished some scanty biographical notices 

 of their authors. This list was afterwards extended to one 

 hundred and eighty entries, in a revised issue, appended by 

 Mr. Wm. Pickering, to Boosey's " Piscatorial Reminiscences," 

 in 1836. Four years later, Mr. James Wilson appended "An 

 abbreviated list of one hundred works on Halieuticks " to his 

 sporting treatise, "The rod and the gun," which treatise, as 

 well as the list in an abbreviated form, had been originally 

 printed in the 7th edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 

 and, in an enlarged form, in the 8th edition of that work. 

 This was followed, in 1847, by the " Waltonian Library" of 

 Dr. Bethune, the able, erudite and sympathetic editor of the 

 American edition of " The Complete Angler," in which publi- 

 cation it figured as an appendix. It contained about three 

 hundred entries. Finally, in 1856, appeared the "Bibliographi- 

 cal Catalogue " of Mr. J. Russell Smith, given as a sequel to 

 Mr. Robert Blakey's " Angling literature of all nations," and of 

 which, as we have elsewhere stated, it may be said to have 

 formed the most valuable feature. This contains two hundred 

 and sixty-four works on angling. 



