Negley Farson GOING FISHING Hardback 1981
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Negley Farson GOING FISHING Hardback 1981
1981 edition, first print hardback of a classic GOING FISHING Travel and Adventure in Two Hemispheres by Negley Farson and published by Clive Holloway Books, London, 1981. Illustrated by C. F. Tunnicliffe. (Originally published in 1942)
The book is in very good condition (Clean black cloth boards, white lettering on spine which has only minor rubbing to bottom edges) with only slight wear to the illustrated dust jacket, which is not price clipped (minor creasing to the edges, tiny nicks to the top spine edges and 'bleeding' stain inside the jacket which is invisible from outside). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.
American author and adventurer Negley Farson was raised by his eccentric grandfather, the Civil War General James Negley. He was educated at Andover and read civil engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was expelled from this institution and emigrated to England. He went into journalism and travelled to Russia, being present in Petrograd the day the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. Farson went on to become one of the most renowned foreign correspondents of his day, interviewing Gandhi in India, witnessing Gandhi's arrest in Poona, witnessing bank-robber John Dillinger's naked body in the morgue just after he had been shot down by Hoover’s men and meeting Hitler, who described Farson’s blond son, Daniel, as a “good Aryan boy.”
A renowned fisherman, Farson wrote one of the classics of fishing literature, Going Fishing. The story of his life is told in his two volumes of autobiography The Way Of a Transgressor and A Mirror for Narcissus. Negley Farson had more opportunity than most to enjoy his favourite sport to the full. Travelling continuously across the world with his two most prized possessions - a fishing rod and a typewriter - he found adventure at every turn. And wherever there was water, he fished... Rainbow trout in the Andes, sea trout in the Shetland lochs, sturgeon in the Black Sea - from the Catskills to the Caucasus, from the Baltic to the Kalahari.
Going Fishing was first published in 1942 by Country Life and also in the US at that time. But this is much more than a fishing book, but also of adventure and travel in many parts of the globe, mainly between the two World Wars. The story begins surf casting for stripers on the New Jersey coast, and in the telling it vaults effortlessly from the chalk streams to the Caucasus, and goes on with a fine fish taken from the Savitca, a swift-flowing Slovenian river. There are chapters about Pacific Salmon, The Shetland Islands, Uxbridge, and The Hebrides, Ireland, the Caucasus, Moscow and the Danube. Another chapter invokes comparisons between fishing for trout underneath erupting volcanoes in Chile, rural and urban life in England, rural and cosmopolitan life in France and Norway. A chapter about Yugoslavia and poaching, and the chapter about small stream fishing in the West Country. The book is spiced with interesting characters, encounters and his amazing insight into human nature. As Farson wrote of his book: 'There is not a record or even a very big fish in it.' He states that he 'loves his rods' and adds 'I can get a lot of fun by just taking them out of their cases and looking at them ...But chiefly I love rods because of their associations, the places they have brough me to.'
The book is memorable for the accessibility of the writing - there is, for example, so much to hold the fascination of the non-angler, that fishing, game, and Farson's life are inextricably intertwined simply adds to the reader's pleasure. As a fishing and travel book it is the original and the best and simply a superb classic.
The book also contains a reproduced handwritten dedication note in blue ink from Negley Farson to Reginald Bruce on front endpaper and illustrations from the famous British bird painter Charles Tunnicliffe's splendid wood engravings.
"Some years after the publication of Going Fishing Negley Farson wrote, of Yugoslavia.
'Fishing those streams was my Nirvana. A short time after I was in the stream my mind was miles away from it, in another world. In this mood, letting my mind wander freely. I had moments when I came as close to some of the intuitive truths as any Hindu practising Yoga. There was the water, pure as the snows from which it came; the beech and alder in spring bud as the world began to renew itself the steady rocks ripping the flow into a dancing white rapid and up above, where the dark pines stood over a deep pool, a bend around which lay another infinitely lovely prospect. Here was the grace of life.'
He was poaching the Regents River at the time.
To a receptive person and Negley Farson was that what you get out of fishing is inlimitley more than fish. Neither size nor numbers should matter much, fishing should be the exercise of your skill ( with experimentation as perhaps its greatest adventure ) and its rewards the spots it brings you to. If these are not your main objectives then you don't know fishing.
But Negley Farson did more than experiment with fishing. He experimented with life. Whilst others sought security he sought adventure and in it he found security. Partly because of his success as a foreign correspondent and author but, to begin with, because adventure was its own complete reward.
This book has some of the best fishing stories ever written, they are constantly selected for inclusion in angling anthologies. But you must read it all, perhaps many times over, for the more you learn from it, the closer you are drawn to its overall philosophy. And the more you will realise that ( paradoxically ) it just isn't possible to glance at it again without drawing yet another thrill from some passage that you somehow 'missed' before."
148 pages. Illustrated with black & white illustration and map.
ISBN: 0 907745 00 8
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Negley Farson GOING FISHING Hardback 1981