© Wolf Avni June 28, 2004

What is it about trout? More than any other fish, they have become the focus of an unabating  scrutiny that  has endured for centuries.  It was more than 500 years ago,  in 1496,  that the prioress of the nunnery of St Albans, Dame Juliana Berner  first  published her seminal "Treatysse On How To Take Fyshe With An Angle"‚.  Fifteen hundred years earlier, Alianus had recorded what is perhaps the first written record of fly-fishing - in De Natura Animilium - where he tells how the Macedonians  would, in the Aestrus River, "fish for fish of a speckled hue", using a tied imitation of a fly they called hippurus.
 
The fascination seems only to intensify which each passing century and as we slide into the new  millennium, it is claimed that more has been written and said over the past 2000 odd  years about trout and fly-fishing,  than any single other creature or  human activity. Looking at my bookshelf, at the serried rows of modern  paperbacks all mixed in with cloth and leather bound tomes of yesteryear, it is a claim not difficult to believe. In the interim, their habitat, biology, and behaviour have been   dissected, analysed and interpreted from an angling perspective  by everyone from behaviourists to geneticists. Along with any number of career scientists, a vast and growing  horde of enthusiastic anglers have applied themselves to enquiry into  every single aspect of trout, their aquatic environment and the minutiae of their biology. Some are clinical, others are poetic.  Shelf upon overburdened  shelf, each  congested beyond endurance  with titles covering everything from fish diet to  pathology, from breeding and their  husbandry to stream management and habitat restoration; fact,  fiction and anecdote, all jostling each other for space.   For every one of the more that 100 titles that may be found there, I know of hundreds of others which I do not yet own or have not read, many I never will.  As one title goes out of print, swallowed by  collectors around the globe, it is immediately replaced in the bookstores by  a half-dozen new publications, the vast majority of which will deservingly  vanish beyond memory within a few short years.  Of course not all are equally incisive, allowing David Profumo, in "The Magic Wheel"‚   to claim that "Many experts in the field have glided into print on the subject, unable to write for toffee, inferior piscatorial literature, feverish with enthusiasm or entangled in its own jargon is dully predictable stuff, bristling with folksiness and bucolic warblings"  He goes on to warn "That all anglers are congenital  liars and that, uniquely in the animal kingdom, the fish enjoys a pronounced degree of posthumous growth, are common place themes of a more light-hearted aspect of angling satire...."
 
Be that as it may and cruel as such flippancy may seem, it is now in the dead of winter when most anglers - even the compulsive and obsessive - driven by  sub-zero temperatures to  cut  back somewhat on their time out on the water,  remember their bookshelves and the many fishing lessons that can be learned there.  More than any other time it is now,  during  these  long, cold nights, that  we reminisce in our libraries, turning there  for a fix to the fever of  flyfishing.
 

All of which, by remarkable coincidence brings us to the current republishing of  "A MEAN-MOUTHED, HOOK-JAWED, BAD-NEWS SON-OF-A-FISH‚" a matter in which by some oblique logic it might be said that I have a personal interest.  Given that I wrote the damn thing, I guess that is a  point. What the hell!  The thing is, like so many other fishing titles, no sooner had it been published (by STRUIK in 1997), than  it slipped out of print within a few short months, sold out in no time.  In less than a year and a half my royalty cheques had all dried up - and me with children clamouring for an education. Things looked pretty dire,  till along came GONZO FISHING Books,  like a knight in shining armour  and recognising its unique qualities - or at least the insufferable burden of trying to buy my ineducable kids an  education -  have reprinted the book  in a second edition with a print run of 5000 copies.  This second edition, published under a brand new cover and printed by one of South Africa‚s most prestigious printing houses, will hopefully, in time filter through to book shops everywhere.  But in the meantime,  for those who cannot wait, it  is available  direct from  Gonzo Fishing Books.  They can be contacted at P.O. Box 227. Underberg, 3257, or, more conveniently, email enquiries to
troutcup@futurenet.co.za

In parting, let me remind readers everywhere that the cover price, at R98,  is less than the cost of a decent day‚s fishing, and  each time you buy one, you make a modest yet significant contribution towards the sound socialisation of my unmanageable offspring.        

SPECS
 
SIZE ; 150x210MM,
 
160 PAGES  INCLUDING 14  photographic plates in  full colour
 
suggeted retail price; R98.00
 
PAPERBACK WITH  HALF FLAP COVERS FRONT & BACK
 
PUBLISHED BY
GONZO FISHING BOOKS
P.O.BOX 227
UNDERBERG
3257
email trade enquiries to; troutcup@futurenet.co.za