As a reference, leaf through your August, 1914 copy of National Sportsman to page 170. That article by P.J. Malloy on fly fishing was what started me reading trout and salmon literature, which has confused me considerably since. I was greatly impressed by the entire August issue and crayoned some of the more notable illustrations.

Since then, I have read considerable trout and salmon material. At first, I thought it was written the way it often is because the writers didn't know any better, but I have now concluded they do it on purpose. This is because I wrote a trout book myself, foolishly employing the tactics I would have used had I been writing about some other subject.

I blush now to recall that I titled it, The Practical Book of Trout Fishing, the word "practical" dooming the thing from the beginning--but what did I know? Suffice it to say that when it went out of print almost immediately, Simon & Schuster didn't even give me a chance to buy the remainders. (For you peasants not familiar with the publishing business, the remainders are the copies left when a turkey is a drug on the market.) Simon & Schuster didn't even tell me it was out of print, but it now occurs to me that maybe they didn't have my address. I believe they misplaced the entire transaction for reasons I shall pursue. However, you are welcome to come over to my place any time and read my copy.

When the book had been out for only a short time (out in this case being a very apt term), an old friend of mine who owns a bookstore phoned Simon & Schuster to buy a few copies as a friendly gesture. He was told that no one named Charles Waterman had ever written a book for Simon & Schuster. (Already they were trying to wash their hands of the whole thing.)

My friend insisted, saying he had a copy in his hands at the moment and that it bore the names of both Simon & Schuster and Waterman, whereupon the lady on the other phone asked him how long he had been in the business. (You can't be too careful.) My friend said his store had been operating for almost exactly 80 years and this evidently was long enough to establish some measure of stability for the lady said she would call back.

When she did, she explained to my friend that The Practical Book of Trout Fishing was listed under Home Repairs and she would send him some copies. This made my bookstore friend feel very silly indeed because when you own an 80-year-old store you certainly should know enough to look for trout books under Home Repairs.

THE WHOLE COURSE OF TROUT LITERATURE has been unusual, as you know. The first well-known and oft-quoted trout author was Dame Juliana, prioress of a nunnery in England, and her contribution came along in the 15th century, describing a whole batch of flies and telling how to make rods and lines. An interesting sidelight to this is that evidently there was no such person. John McDonald, angling historian, pretty well proves that, but says Julie is a full-fledged myth, which is better than being real. I don't know where they sent her royalties.

The best known of the trout writing tribe, of course, is Izaak Walton, a worm soaker who was in the iron business. He wrote so pretty along about 1653 that he is accepted with reverence by modern trout readers, in spite of the fact that he used tactics that would get a present-day angler drummed out of the scurviest trout club. After the first edition of The Compleat Angler, Walton had Charles Cotton write the part on fly fishing. Cotton, who was a good fly fisherman, was a hot potato for reviewers because he wrote some adult approaches (adult meaning sexy and dirty, for everyone knows the older you get the more acceptable bad words become).

(On that sex and stuff, I am continually teed off at modern novelists, screenwriters and such who occasionally swerve into the fishing business and take unfair advantage. They stick in sex and take home added royalties while we professional outdoor writers haven't yet even mentioned ankles. These cheap shots were occasionally taken by Ernest Hemingway, and later by guys like Tom McGuane. Of course, Hemingway is lauded for a piece called Big Two-Hearted River in which, for heaven's sake, the hero fished with grasshoppers. But Hemingway liked a direct approach. When he had the black offshore boat, the Pilar, he used to chum up sharks and work them over with a submachine gun. McGuane's stuff is the more disgusting because his characters get out of bed and then fish with fine rods and small flies--a combination almost impossible to compete with.)

If you think the trout anglers of merrie old England didn't take their fishing seriously you should look up some of the passages about baits, some of which included mixtures of human flesh and blood. Of course, politics of those days being what it was, there was undoubtedly the odd discarded corpse lying about from time to time. Actual grave-robbing is not described in those early works but the heavy innuendo is that a real gung-ho angling buff wouldn't balk at digging people as well as worms. This is hardly ever done today, not because fishermen wouldn't go that far, but because there has been more of a trend toward dry flies and nymphs.

Some of the early angling tactics I read were sporting enough, even when the lures were crude. There is the one in which you troll by tying a line to a goose's foot, and according to whoever wrote the stuff attributed to the imaginary Juliana, you "shall see good hauling whether the goose or the pike shall have the better." This is really sporty and I am a little uncertain as to what happens if the goose loses--but let's stick to the trout fishing parts.

I am intrigued by some of the nuts-and-bolts material attributed to William Scrope (British), who gives instructions regarding wading prior to the advent of Red Ball hip boots and Converse chest-highs. Scrope (pronounced Scroop according to Arnold Gingrich, who wrote a review of angling literature) said that when fishing in winter you should pull down your stockings from time to time and that if your legs were black or blue you should knock off for a while. This is very advanced stuff and on a level with the much-acclaimed advice of ancient authors to approach so that the fish don't see you.

Critics state this sneaky approach is a sure sign of advanced thinking on the part of early authors but it is used by even a dull-witted blue heron so I am not really much impressed.

IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN WATCHING, I should explain that there has been quite a bit written about angling writing. The late Arnold Gingrich did 344 pages on The Fishing In Print, a critique of fishing authorship from then to now. In its way, that approaches the fat two-volume set on Trout, done by Ernest Schwiebert.

I did not know there was as much about trout as Schwiebert wrote and was careful with my set, fearful of dropping it on my feet. Schwiebert knows a hell of a lot about trout fishing, and if it's really more than you cared to learn about salmonids you might still find a copy of my Practical Book of Trout Fishing, which is not nearly so bulky and much less expensive. Incidentally, I feel Schwiebert has gained true celebrity status because I recently heard him referred to as "The Schweeb." Such nicknames are on a par with those commonly reserved for star athletes.

When reading modern trout doctrine, in case you have a feeling you've been over it before, take heart from the fact that a few years back a book collector found a little volume in Britain that was written before Walton and used exactly the same format that he did. No name on it. There seems little doubt that Izaak lifted the idea and much of the material--but his writing has so much charm that it's the original writer who should apologize, I guess.

WASHINGTON IRVING, WHO WAS BETTER than a fair hand with a quill, started something that has incurred my everlasting enmity. Irving was so enamored of the bucolic charm of Walton that he gathered up some of his buddies and went fishing to see if he could absorb some of that rural beauty. It developed that the American puckerbrush wasn't as appealing as the English sward so everything went wrong and Irving, the fink, wrote funnily of the futile efforts of his cute party.

This, as far as I can research, was the first of roughly 90,000 cute pieces about sedentary folk who undertake to learn to fish with comic travail. In most cases I have been able to restrain my merriment and have never understood why a beginning fisherman is funnier than a rookie kumquat picker or a novice oyster shucker. So, in the vernacular of his time, a pox upon Washington Irving's treatise.

I find that in early fishing literature there was a strong tendency to use pen names. Part of this was because fishermen were considered shiftless bums. Later there have been a few such phony names because the writers recognized their stuff as being bad enough to bring possible physical retribution from readers. I once got a really nasty letter saying that anyone who couldn't think up a better pen name than "Waterman" for a fishing column was a congenital idiot. At times, I have seriously considered using a pen name but have never done anything about it. Two that I have considered were Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Frost.

Henry William Herbert was one of the earlier American fishing writers to use a pseudonym and wrote as Frank Forester. But then, Herbert, it seems, was on the lam from some social faux pas in England and may have been trying to cover his tracks and protect his family. Good writer. Thomas Bastard used his own name when he wrote about fishing in 1598. At least I don't think that was a pen name.

In more recent years, Sparse Grey Hackle has become one of the more beloved of trout authors, but he now keeps letting us know that it isn't his real name, which is Alfred W. Miller. As I see it, Miller must have started using the other name because he was afraid he would bomb. When his stuff went big he wished he'd used the real name. Look, Sparse. You can't have it both ways.

THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN A TROUT BOOK is to have a gimmick, something I was slow to grab, and no matter how good your book, you need a pitch to sell it.

For example, Sylvester Nemes wrote a fine work on The Soft-Hackled Flies. Now the book is about wet flies, which have been around since the Macedonians first jerked some neck feathers from their roosters, but for some time wet flies were in disfavor as bourgeois lures barely above night crawlers. They came back slowly, being disguised as nymphs and streamers for respectability. But when Nemes came up with that "soft hackle" business, everybody quit hiding their wet fly boxes and came right out into the sunlight.

After generations of trying to make a dry fly float without drag, everybody was greatly relieved to see Leonard Wright's volume on Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect, in which he recommends a little hopping and skipping for a dry.

But I want to be sure you understand. In each case the gimmick ends up as only a small part of the book, the rest of which is invariably sound information on basic trout fishing. The books are good but we have to pretend they are about new things.

For example, if I'd had sense enough to call mine The Dry Fly Under Water it could have been a real banger. Maybe Simon & Schuster would have filed it under "Adult Literature" and the presses would have been running nights.

There was that by Swisher and Richards on Selective Trout. Again we had an excellent study on trout habits and trout fishing methods. But the thing that made it go was the "No-Hackle Fly," which meant one that just sat on the water, ker-splut, with no hackle tips acting as legs. For a while it appeared that this was revolutionary material, even though there were hackle-less flies in Britain in the 17th century. Finally, we conclude that the no-hackle fly is great--sometimes. Swisher and Richards knew that all along. They never intended to have public burnings of the other kinds.

It took literature to make nymph fishing respectable, and now the real nymph types consider the dry a little crude. For a couple of hundred years it was the other way around. Until Ernest Schwiebert started counting them, I figured 15 or 20 imitation mayfly nymphs were enough. Now, even when I catch a trout I feel inadequate, sure that I have used the wrong thing, that my fish is retarded and that thousands of Latin-speaking trout are laughing at me. Although the mayflies had me whipped, I thought the stoneflies were relatively simple until Carl Richards, Doug Swisher and Fred Arbona, Jr., came up with a book called Stoneflies in which they say there are 461 species. Since I had known of only three, this was pretty disconcerting.

To many fishermen the flies are more important than the trout though, and fishing trips are impatient interludes between sessions at the tying vise. I have seen a man carrying a fly box measuring 4 1/2" X 7" X 1", packed tightly with number 20 flies. The tier and owner was elderly. He'd have to be.

This passion for new flies has sold many a trout volume. Joe Bates got 395 pages out of streamers and bucktails, and Hatches by Al Caucci and Bob Nastasi takes you into scary depths with enough pictures of living flies to turn a coward into a spinfisherman.

Now one of the best trout books I have read is The Trout and the Fly by Brian Clarke and John Goddard. These British authors give marvelous instruction on the ways trout behave because they are good observers and they live where you can see trout do their thing instead of being surprised as they come out of rough water.

But Brian and John, true to the formula, come up with a new fly as reader bait. The new fly is tied with the hook sticking up and is called the USD Paradun. (Any serious fisherman knows that USD stands for "upside down.") It is especially interesting for this number is tied expressly to keep the body of the fly off the water so the fish sees nothing but the hackles or "legs." You will recall that in earlier research we pointed out how the no-hackle fly was made for the opposite effect. No legs and with the body in the water. This paradox doesn't bother your true fly lover at all. Each principle was the basis for a book, but then there have been successful separate texts on flies in slow water, still water and fast water.

Trout authors tend toward misty moods and chin-quivering nostalgia--the direct opposite of the aggressive illiteracy practiced by those who write about black bass. They are also strong on tradition, some of them scorning anything but old bamboo rods of famous make, even if the glue is coming loose. You must know that the nymph writers and the dry fly writers have carried on a running battle for 130 years in England. Your true dry fly purist would as soon be caught with an automatic reel as with a nymph.

One of the worst failings of trout fishermen is collecting books on fishing. Being aloof from such carryings-on and having barely passed a Latin course with the aid of a blond sorority pledge some time back, I thought I could take trout books or leave them alone.

Still, careful measurement shows I own fourteen-and-a-half feet of them, most of them pretty bad. However, I find that the most valuable collectors' items among books are smellers that were introduced with small press runs and thus became scarce. So hang on to your copy of Practical Trout Fishing, buddy. It'll be worth a fortune.

But then, whenever I'm about to give up on trout reading, I come upon something like this, hidden in the prologue of Goddard and Clarke's book: "He is exquisitely streamlined; a poem to the eye as he throbs on the current, with the waters sleeking by him like liquid, silent time."

Trout have some real friends.