The Literary Fly Fisher

Copyright 2010, Kenneth H. Lokensgard

NOTE: For a correction of these dates, please see the first reader’s response, written by a former employee of Goodspeed’s Book Shop.

Charles Eliot Goodspeed opened Goodspeed’s Book Shop in 1937.  His Boston store grew to be one of the most respected antiquarian book shops in the United States, and it was in business until 1993.  Goodspeed cared not only about books, but also about fishing. As biographer Walter Muir Whitehill puts it, Goodspeed was “a devout disciple of Izaak Walton.”[1] No doubt, this prompted Goodspeed to compile a massive collection of new and previously published fishing essays.  This collection was published in 1946, as A Treasury of Fishing Stories (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company). According to the book’s “Acknowledgements” section, Goodspeed gathered most of the previously published selections from a collection of fishing works left to Harvard Libraries by Daniel Butler Fearing.

Among the sometimes…