The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation

London: Printed by T. Maxey for Rich. Marriot, 1653. First edition. Engraved cartouche of fish on title, ten engraved vignettes of fish in text, two engraved pages of music. 1 vols. Small 8vo. Nineteenth-century dark green morocco, gilt, gilt spine with raised bands and citron morocco labels, marbled endpapers, a.e.g., by BEDFORD. Final leaf neatly repaired at outer margin, with one letter in neat pen facsimile; contemporary manuscript correction to p. 245, line 17 (changing “contention” to “contentment.”). Fine copy, with the signature of JW RIMINGTON WILSON on verso of the front flyleaf, and the morocco ex-libris of GEORGE GOYDER. Boxed. First edition. Engraved cartouche of fish on title, ten engraved vignettes of fish in text, two engraved pages of music. 1 vols. Small 8vo. A choice copy of the first edition of Walton’s Compleat Angler, a landmark of mid-seventeenth century English letters and one of the foundation stones of angling literature, with distinguished nineteenth century provenance.

James Wilson Rimington-Wilson (1822-1877) of Broomhead Hall, Yorkshire, was a strong amateur chess player and a noted collector of books on chess and other sports. The library was dispersed in 1928: Jerome Kern owned a manuscript poem on chess by Oliver Goldsmith from the Rimington Wilson library; and a manuscript hand list of his sporting books, 1866, is at the University of Virginia. Wing W 661; Coigney 1; Church Catalogue I, 32; Pforzheimer 1048; Grolier Wither to Prior III 193; Westwood and Satchell, p. 217