Fishing With John by IGLAUER, EDITH

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York: 1988. Hardcover with dustjacket. Good condition but with small water stains. Contains a gift inscription on the title page from the author. This is the story of an adventure. In 1974, in middle age, Edith Iglauer, who had been born into a comfortable well-off family in Cleveland and had lived a privileged, urban, sophisticated life in New York, met a commercial salmon fisherman in British Columbia, married him, and spent the better part of the next four years, until Daly's death, on his forty-one-foot troller, the Morekelp. The book is also the story of John Daly, an impassioned and greatly talented fisherman who was convinced he could "think like a fish"; an amateur philosopher who worked out, and followed, an original set of beliefs and principles; a mystic who, after forty years of fishing, felt himself to be at one with the sea and the mountains along the British Columbia coast; a scholarly-looking, high-spirited, full-blown eccentric who covered the white walls of his pilothouse with his favorite quotations in bold black letters ("Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke. O. W. Holmes"), kept a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam under the mattress of his bunk, listened, between fish, to Mozart on the CBD radio, carried on polite conversations with his stove, and took hundreds of photographs of sunsets at sea, each of which was individually fixed, with place and circumstances, in his memory; an outdoorsman who hated and avoided cities and went so far as to have an aversion to architects because they designed buildings; and a man who was known everywhere along the B.C. coast for his integrity and noble character. Moreover, the book is love story. ISBN: 0374155240.