David and Charles, Newton Abbot, Devon, 1972. Small amount of wear at top and bottom of dustjacket spine, foxing at page edges and on endpapers.

"Fishing books may teach or may beguile. This is not a teaching book and to say that it is a beguiling one would be to claim kinship with better men, for to beguile, so my dictionary tells me, is to divert attention from anything tedious or painful, and to do that a writer needs a goose quill or a nib of gold. We may assume that the first was used by the author of The Compleat Angler, and the second by the author of Where the Bright Waters Meet. I, alas, have had to make do with a ballpoint. However, if these reflections and recollections lighten an hour or two, that ubiquitous instrument will have served a not ignoble end." (taken from the author's foreword).