Anglers, it is widely believed, find it hard to tell the full truth. Or, to be less blunt, they exaggerate. It's so often: "You should have seen the one that got away." But let us be less severe and just say that they often deal in hyperbole and self-deception, for they are generally easy-going and kindly. Now, a startling piece of news: the first of the writers on the subject or rather the first in the English language, Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, not only told less than the truth, he turns out to have been a plagiarist, to have passed off the work of another man, or portions of it, as his own. There is some evidence that William Samuel, a vicar in Huntingdon, England, wrote a book The Arte of Angling, published in London. "This book is sensational, because its author employs the device of a fishing lesson, with Piscator and Viator, over 70 years before Walton. Izaak undoubtedly lifted this idea and some of the text as well in his Compleat Angler without acknowledgement. So, we now know even more about where the old plagiarist got his stuff, but more importantly, here is a lovely, charmingly witty, historic little book which belongs in every fishing library."
You may note from the tone, that the above quotations comes from the list of a book-publishing firm. It is The Flyfisher's Classic Library, of Ashburton, Devon, which specialises in classic angling books and believes in finely-bound volumes, too. The history of this find, the discovery of a single copy of The Arte of Angling by an American collector who was on a visit to London, his presentation of the book, believed to be the only copy anywhere, to his old university Princeton with the offer to subsidise its reprinting, was followed by intense investigation, for the title page was missing. And only after the Princeton reprint was the author's identity firmly established. The author used the same formula as Walton later copied - a dialogue. The original book had Piscator and Viator - fisherman and wayfarer or traveller; Walton has Piscator and Venator - fisherman and hunter.
The publishers have additional matter to the text "fully bound in leather, marbled endpapers, gilt top etc": pre-publication price £47, thereafter £55. You'd like to see if William Samuel claims to have good catches and if so, of what fish.