Mr. Crabtree Goes Fishing

My late grandfather who took me fishing (alas, not often enough) had this book in his shelf, and on family visits I would sit and read the cartoons while the adults talked over my head. I read it with absolute wonder. Years later, as an adult trying I suppose to recapture a bit of lost youth I searched all over for a copy (before the internet), eventually finding a battered specimen in Ross on Wye. And now its back in print-probably because of people like me searching so hard!

The drawings are perfect,drawn with art, movement and affection. Mr Crabtree is wise, confident and a strict but patient and kindly teacher of the boy Peter. I wish my dad had been like Mr Crabtree, alas he had no interest in fishing.

The watercolours of the fish are matchless, my favourite is the perch. A lot of the advice is dated (for example using treble hooks for carp) but I have used the techniques, and some of the tackle (eg cane rods and centre pin reels) and they still work.

There is a passage about the way the float can dither and slowly slide away when the tench are bubbling, and in fact the day I caught my first tench the float behaved exactly like is says in this book.

A nostalgic book about 'halcyon days' to take the honest and the frustrated angler to an English dreamland of pikey rivers, shoals of perch and bream, carp that pull off 20 yards of line, dace dashing at a dry fly, cane rods and Aerial reels and red floats for tench on 'the glorious 16th' that may perhaps never have existed but jolly well ought to have.


Perfect   April 24, 2001
47 out of 47 found this review helpful

This book will appeal to everyone who has ever been fishing. It is jammed packed with all the reasons why we go fishing and is in its own way very funny. Venables was way ahead of his time and this book is still relevant today. There interesting comments from the author and some very amusing walks down memory lane. Highly recommended !