The literature of the field, the river, and the turf — a distinguished specialty of the house.
Sporting books form one of the oldest and most clubbable of collecting fields, and it was among the specialties for which Randall House was known. The category gathers the literature of angling, hunting, shooting, and the turf — a tradition of writing that is by turns practical, meditative, and gloriously eccentric, and that has attracted devoted collectors for centuries.
The Angling Classics
Angling literature begins, for most collectors, with Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) — one of the most reprinted books in the English language and a field of collecting all its own, so numerous and various are its editions. Around it has grown a whole library: the fly-fishing manuals, the river narratives, and the contemplative essays that treat angling as a philosophy as much as a sport. The American Museum of Fly Fishing preserves this heritage on the tackle-and-history side.
The Field and the Turf
Beyond the river lie the literatures of the hunt and the racecourse: the great illustrated works of sporting art, the studbooks and racing calendars, the memoirs of famous shots and famous horses. Many of these books are prized as much for their color plates — the aquatints and lithographs of the golden age of sporting illustration — as for their text, connecting the field to our Natural History holdings.
Why Sporting Books Are Collected
Sporting collectors are among the most loyal in the trade, and for good reason. The books unite fine writing, fine illustration, and a subject their owners love and practice. Editions are often small, condition is frequently poor (these were working books, carried afield), and fine copies are correspondingly scarce — a combination that rewards the patient collector. Many overlap with modern first editions, for the twentieth century produced sporting writers of real literary distinction.
Building the Collection
The field invites focus: a single sport, a single illustrator, the editions of one classic, or the sporting literature of one region. Whatever the theme, condition and completeness — every plate present, the binding sound — govern value, as our Glossary explains. It is a field in which knowledge, patience, and a genuine love of the subject are the collector's best guides.