Western Washington University Libraries
Special Collections
Oral History Program

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Paul Ford

This interview was conducted with Paul and Mary Ann Ford on June 19, 2009, at their home in Wenatchee, Washington. The interviewer is Tamara Belts. TB: How did you get started collecting, books as a whole, but especially your fly fishing books?   PF: My first readings about fly fishing were in magazines: Field and Stream and Outdoor Life when I was probably eleven or twelve years old. The most popular book in America at that time about fly fishing was Ray Bergman’s best-selling book Trout. That had been published in the Thirties and then republished and republished. There were very few fly fishing books published during my early youth (that is when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen).  That was during the Second World War, with shortages of paper and there were not that many men around to read books.

Books also cost too much. But a magazine on the other hand, was a dime or fifteen cents. So it was during that period that I developed great affection for writers like Jason Lucas, who wrote the famous book, Bass, and he wrote lots of articles in Field and Stream. Ted Trueblood wrote about steelhead fishing and about Atlantic salmon fishing.

One really funny part about this starting to collect books and reading about fishing was that I assumed that when Bergman or Trueblood said that a certain fly worked really well on trout, I assumed that same fly would work on chain pickerel and bass and perch, because we had few, if any, trout in the part of New England where I grew up. So I ordered the 9-3 landlocked Atlantic Salmon fly and the Grey Ghost.  Now both these flies were tied to imitate fresh-water smelt and the landlocked salmon loved fresh water smelt. There were two problems here: there were no Atlantic salmon where I lived and there were no freshwater smelt. So consequently I was stuck with a bunch of flies that wouldn’t catch anything except an occasional pickerel.

 

You asked about how the book collecting got started, and so I move now into a mature period when I did buy a few books like the Lucas book, and a book by Sid Gorton called Fishing From Top to Bottom. I might say that all three of these books mentioned: the Bergman book, the Lucas book, and the Gordon book, were all how-to-do-it books. There was no romance to them. There was nothing much about appreciation for the great outdoors. They were how to do it.

 

There came a long period when I didn’t collect any fishing books at all, although I fly fished a lot. I didn’t really get started collecting fly fishing books until Mary Ann, who is the guilty party in all of this, began giving me fly fishing books for birthdays, for anniversaries, for Christmas, and just for the joy of giving me something. She started off with Steve Raymond’s books, and more especially I suppose Roderick Haig-Brown’s books. We visited the place that Roderick Haig-Brown made famous for fishing. That was Campbell River. I fished the same island pools that he wrote about.

 

MAF: We visited his home in Campbell River and sat in his library with all the books and gear. They handed us a pair of white gloves, each of us, and we got to sit at Haig-Brown’s desk and look at whatever book we wanted to pull off the shelf. That was fun.

 

PF: In our beginning ventures, I don’t think you could say there was real purpose to our collecting. It was a matter of, we’ve always loved books, and we love book stores. So we would go to book stores in Seattle and a famous one in Portland. What was the name of that one?

 

MAF: Powell’s

 

PF: Powell’s.

 

MAF: The used-book stores type.

 

PF: There was one in Sisters, Oregon, and up in Victoria, and Vancouver.  Everywhere we went we bought books, but for some reason they tended to be about American fly fishing, rather than English fly fishing.  They tended to focus on fishing in the Northwest. And probably besides Steve Raymond and Roderick Haig-Brown, the most famous author in the Northwest was Trey Combs who wrote the wonderful book, Steelhead Fly Fishing and Flies, and then other follow-up books on steelhead. But his first book, Steelhead Trout, and then the other book, Steelhead Fly Fishing and Flies, were filled with pictures and language and the patterns, and that was when I also started tying fly steelhead flies. I ended up with just two patterns: a black leech pattern that I used during the summer mostly and an orange leech pattern that I used during the winter. They were highly effective, but they were based on what I read in Trey Combs. My favorite fishing hangout was the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River right near our home in Arlington.

 

We continued to collect books and then I guess we decided that we would try to fill in a more or less comprehensive book collection of Americana, from the very earliest writing about American fly fishing to the present. But I think, and I don’t know for what reason, it must be temperament, it must be emotive, we tended to focus on books that were written about beautiful fish in beautiful places, and the romance of fly fishing. You find that of course in Haig-Brown and to a large degree in all of what Steve Raymond wrote and later in Henry Middleton’s, The Earth is Enough and the Starlight Creek Angling Society.

 

One of the fascinating things that we discovered after we’d been in the fly fishing book collection process was that the early books on fly fishing tended to be written by American clergymen. They start off with people like George Washington Bethune who did the first American printed edition of the The Complete Angler. He buried within it, the early history of American fly fishing, which is a 32-page footnote that one would not ordinarily find; that one stumbled upon, but which we came upon because it’s mentioned in Gingrich’s famous book, Fishing in Print. But at any rate, American clergymen: there were people like Henry Ward Beecher; the famous preacher at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn during the 1850’s who wrote about fly fishing. There were other famous men, Henry Van Dyke, who wrote several books that are now in Special Collections at WWU. And then the Reverend Arthur MacDougall, who wrote the wonderful, wonderful Dud Dean series of books in vernacular about fishing for landlocked Atlantic salmon and what he called square tails, pronounced “squaw tails.” Square tails are actually brook trout in Maine. But MacDougall was another Congregationalist clergyman and I suppose he published at least a dozen books and I would think a hundred or more fishing stories in what became Outdoor Life. He must have had a lot of spare time and he must have made a fortune publishing these stories. In fact a lot of those pastors must have had a lot of spare time.

 

The most influential book in our early collecting was Arnold Gingrich’s Fishing in Print, in which he points out what he considers to be the very best of the American fishing books published from the originals of the [William] Milnor book published in 1830 up to about 1960, let’s say. Having read Gingrich, we realized that the key to having a great collection was in bibliography. We had to identify and study the great bibliographies.

 

Probably the most famous early Americana fly fishing bibliography was written by [Charles E.] Goodspeed of Boston and called Angling in America. He did a social-intellectual history of fly fishing and fly book publishing in America up to 1930. The next best book probably was written by a man named [Charles M.] Wetzel, [American Fishing Books], published in the 1950’s. Then there was the famous [Henry P.] Bruns book, [Angling Books of the Americas] which most people turn to even today when they’re looking up particular citations. Bruns came out in [1975] and really is quite complete and

very detailed about each book cited. Then there was a book published by K.A. Sheets in two editions and called American Fishing Books, 1743-1993 and then 1747-1996.  Sheets priced the books for current value that was helpful to collectors. Then the next book of that sort was published about 2006, by [Charles] Thacher, [Angling Books: a Guide for Collectors] which is also in Special Collections.

 

Then there are special kinds of bibliographic books that deal with certain periods in American fly fishing history and they’re dedicated to a man’s commitment to that period. There’s one by Philip Kerridge, [An Address on Angling Literature] (1970), that’s quite valuable at this time that is based on a lecture he did. I believe that it was at Stanford University probably forty years ago. At any rate, the key to a great collection is in bibliography. Having studied Americana fly fishing bibliography, Mary Ann and I decided we would try to collect the major Americana fly fishing books dating back to the early edge of American history.  

 

As we collected the books we decided that we liked the ones that dealt with the beautiful places, and the social-cultural-intellectual history that these books related to the development of fly fishing. There is a real connection between the development of fly fishing and our social history because it tended to be wealthy industrialists that encouraged the writing of these books and who bought these books. Ironically, it was they who contaminated and ruined the best fly streams on the East coast through the mills that they built on those streams, and the contaminants that went into those streams. Nevertheless many of these same industrialists founded clubs whose waters were protected, whose waters were never contaminated, and whose waters still exist on the East coast, most famously in New York State, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and in Pennsylvania.

 

We tended to limit our collecting as much as possible to very fine or new first editions and limited editions. We love the beautiful limited editions that come in drop-spine cases, as you know, with leather on the outside and linen or silk covers on the outside. Then you open the drop-spine case and you find a volume, quarter bound in goatskin leather, usually dyed maroon or black or blue. Again, with linen or silk on the covers. Then on the inside the end papers are handmade paper, the paper upon which the prose is printed is mold made or handmade paper. The printing technique is special.

 

Instead of typical printing techniques, the print is impressed into this very expensive paper. This is called letter-press printing.  In 1995 when Mary Ann and I published our first book under the label, Anglers Hope Press, the cost to produce a letter press book with drop-spine case, the elegant covers and handmade page paper cost about $450.00.  For the author and publisher to make any money, each book had to sell for $650.00.

 

The Golden Age of fly fishing bookmaking extended from about 1985 to 2000. The interesting thing about that period was that those expensive books sold. They were printed in limited editions all between twenty-five and sixty books. They were printed by the really great names in American publishing. Nick Lyons was one of them. Tony Lyons was another and William T. Trego, who ran the Meadow Run Press, was another one. They printed books by some of the most famous writers in all of American fishing history.

 

Tom McGuane is a good example of these world class writers. Now Tom is famous for his fishing writing, but he’s more famous for all of the film scripts he did for Hollywood. He made—well he’s a mega millionaire based on all of these scripts he did for Hollywood. Another very famous writer during this period, and he used to be sort of a friend of Mary Ann and mine, is Russell Chatham. Russell is also one of America’s greatest painters of the outdoor scenes. In fact, a limited edition book of his collection of a hundred paintings now sells for $1200.00. Mary Ann and I have a copy of that in our library. Russell set up a press of his own in Livingston, Montana, called the Clark City Press, and he printed a number of fine books for himself and other authors including McGuane and Dan Gerber.

 

We met Russell when he wasn’t as famous as he is now. He was in Wenatchee, sitting outside a bookstore, trying to peddle his books, and at night he was selling his paintings at a local gallery. He fished in town here with a good friend of mine named Bill Barnett.  Russell was and is a wonderful fisherman. He was so famous he was on Charles Kuralt, when Charles did CBS Sunday Morning. But the story we love to tell about Russell (actually there are two of them), was that he stayed with Bill Barnett one night and Bill reported to me several days later: “Don’t you send that Russ Chatham over to my house to stay anymore. He drank three bottles of my best red wine all at one sitting! Then the next morning he went out and caught three steelhead under that tree, you know where it is, over at Monitor Park, and damn him anyway, he caught all three on a dry fly.” The other story we like to tell about Russell is: we said to him one day when we were visiting him in Livingston, “Russell, why aren’t you writing anymore books?” He said, “I can’t afford to. I have to paint like hell in order to keep up alimony payments to my ex-wives.”

 

Some people like to tell the story about how Russell wrote the preface to the commemorative Pruett edition of Harry Middleton’s, The Earth is Enough.  It seems that Russell wrote that brilliant piece while sitting in a Montana courtroom listening to his then wife testify against him in a divorce hearing!

 

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE

 

PF: Harry Middleton, by the way, was one the country’s greatest fly fishing writers.  He died of a heart attack in 1993 at age 45.  Mary Ann and I feel blessed to have all of his books in their first editions, and including his The Starlight Creek Angling Society in the limited edition.   That’s a bit of the story of the “golden age” of American book publishing. There is one thing that takes place during that period that’s particularly interesting to Mary Ann and me. We met book publishers, book sellers, and we found that many of them were really paranoid. And though they accused the writers who were writing for them of being crazy people, they were just as crazy as the writers themselves. For instance, there was a major war between Bill Trego and Tony Lyons. Trego always claimed that Lyons ruined the market for the deluxe limited editions by bringing out material that was sub-par in terms of its production qualities. Trego claimed that the papers that Tony Lyons used weren’t up to par. The leathers weren’t as good, the books were too thick; there was always something wrong with them. Generally speaking, I think Trego was right.

 

There were also wars among the booksellers. The most famous of those was between Chuck Johnson, who owned at that time, Wilderness Adventures, and a man who used to work for him named Tom Pappas who went out on his own and founded a book company called Just Good Books. Tom Pappas sold more copies of the books that Mary Ann and I produced and Bill Trego published than anybody else, the deluxe limited editions. He was truly a fine, fine man and a fine dealer. But Chuck Johnson thought that Pappas stole Johnson’s list of clients. And so Chuck Johnson sued Pappas and the owner of Just Good Books. That suit went on for years, probably four or five years. Nothing but bitterness came out of that. We think there was no financial settlement. But what finally happened was Tom Pappas got fed up with the business and there was no more Just Good Books, so that was the end of a wonderfully gifted book dealer.  Johnson got into the guide book business.

 

During this period of the “golden age,” we got to be quite friendly with Bill Trego and he asked me to ghost edit some of his most famous authors. One of whom was Jeffery Cardenas. Jeffery was a writer, and a famous fishing guide and owner of the Saltwater Angler Shop in Key West. He wrote a book called Marquesa, which was published in 1995 by Trego at Meadow Run Press. The book is in a drop spine case, with leather on the outside and leather on the inside. The entire book is covered in leather.  It is the story of how this man took a six week sabbatical to live on his little houseboat called Huck Finn. He went out off Florida, anchored in what is called the Marquesas and spent his time fishing and looking at the sky and dreaming. The book was published in two editions, one of fifty copies, the deluxe limited, which sold out immediately at $650.00 a copy. You probably can’t today buy a copy for $1100.00. Trego also published this book in what we call a trade edition, which is just a regular book with a regular cover but in a slip-case. The first edition of that sold out immediately at probably $50 bucks a copy, and now you can’t touch it for less than $175.00 a copy, for the first edition. Then there was second edition, I don’t know if there was a third edition.

 

What’s interesting to us personally is that Jeffrey wrote another book called Sea Level, which is actually a collection of his previous fishing stories taken from Fly, Rod, and Reel, plus two or three other new stories. Bill Trego asked me to edit the book. I thought this was sort of silly since it would have already been edited because the stories were printed in the magazine. But I found mistakes running through it, which I corrected. Jimmy Buffet wrote the introduction and I found mistakes there. Buffet would not accept the corrections and since Buffet was such a famous man, the mistakes were left in it. They were taken out of what Cardenas wrote. Cardenas wrote to me in the trade edition, he wrote a thank you in it. He said, “This is both your book and mine, Paul,” I thought the book not nearly the quality of Marquesa, because Sea Level was a collection of only slightly related stories while Marquesa was a splendid mediation on the fishing life. But the critics, including Steve Raymond, thought Sea Level to be something very special.

 

I did some other ghost editing for Meadow Run Press.  Fro example we did Stephan Sloan’s book, [Fly Fishing] Spoken Here. After I first reviewed the working manuscript, I told Bill Trego that was too miserable to try to edit.  But the editing got done. Sloan hired James Prosek to do the book’s art and he put Prosek’s name on the cover and title page, which helped sell the book.  Prosek was a very popular young artist.  We also helped with John McPhee’s, [The Founding Fish]. McPhee claimed the shad was the fish that saved the American Revolution because George Washington’s troops had little to eat during one eventful winter.  A lucky early shad run provided much needed food.

 

We haven’t told you about one special book that Mary Ann, who’s really the book collector, found. She found it strangely enough in Bellingham, and Mary Ann likes to tell the story of how she found this book when I was in a meeting as provost.

 

MAF: After I retired, I used to go up to Bellingham and we would go out to lunch periodically. I would always have time before or after when I was waiting for Paul. And my most enjoyable thing to do was to go to all the used book stores in Bellingham. From Henderson’s to that other one across—Michael’s—and then there was one in Fairhaven. What I would do each time I would go up there was go to each of the bookstores, if they were open.

 

At one point, the one bookstore in Fairhaven was called Moon something, I think, with a wide variety of used books, very few fishing. I had looked at where they had the section of fishing books, and didn’t find anything.  Then as I was leaving the store, I noticed one special shelf above the cash register.  I don’t remember what its owner called it, but it was extra special used books which obviously cost more than what was on his shelves. So I went through, they weren’t categorized by author or by subject. You just sort of looked at each one of them as you went, and I saw Haig-Brown. Since we had a number of his books, I pulled it off, and thought, “This might be interesting.” And I flipped it open to the cover, and I saw what was written on an end paper, and I saw the letter, and I just shut it right away. I looked at the price and what was it, $20.00 I think? The book was titled, The Measure of the Year. I thought, oh my gosh, this man doesn’t know what he has here. And quickly took it down, thinking that you know he was going to charge me more than what it said in the book. I bought that book and I could hardly wait to see Paul when I met him, because I wanted him to see this treasure that I had found.

 

PF: It’s a treasure because it contains a note, or two notes. One of them is written into the book by a woman named Ann Elmore. It’s written to a lady who introduced Ann Elmore to Haig-Brown and it turns out that Ann Elmore married Haig-Brown. In the correspondence between Ann Elmore and this other lady, we find Ann Elmore saying, “Thank you. If it hadn’t been for you, I would never have married Rod.”

 

And to think that this great find was made while I was at some silly meeting.  What good luck! As was our finding of the Middleton book at Vargo’s. We were wise enough to buy two copies of The Starlight Creek Angling Society book at Vargo’s in Bozeman. But it was just an accident, it was just chance. We wandered in there, and there was the book, actually two copies of the book, and it just happened.

 

I should finish up by saying that the real impetus to the book collecting and our book making came from Mary Ann. Lots of her time was spent searching out these books while I was at, what I now consider to be, probably silly meetings.

 

She always, when we were traveling, led the charge for the nearest bookstore. I remember especially in Sisters, Oregon, where we found a book by Ben Hur Lampman, A Leaf from French Eddy, which is an absolute classic and if it hadn’t been for Mary Ann we never would have found this deluxe limited edition. All those birthdays and Christmases and it continues to this day. She scours catalogs, makes telephone calls. I can remember when she used to threaten people at Amato Publishing if they didn’t get a good copy, an unbruised copy, signed, first edition to us. And that continues to today.

 

Right now, because we have such a comprehensive collection, there really isn’t a lot to fill in and we tend to get the books from auctions. Sometimes we get good buys, sometimes we don’t get anything. But there probably is a limited number of really important American fly fishing books and I would say that we have ninety percent of them. That’s not to say that we have ninety percent of all the books published. There are probably ten thousand published. But it is to say that not all books are worth the publishing, let alone buying. The collection does emphasize the growing social and intellectual character of fly fishing in America rather than how to do it books. We generally don’t buy how to do it books.

 

But we love what we do; we have some gorgeous pictures that we’ve collected. Like that one by John Gierach (the proof for his book, When the Trout Are All As Long As Your Leg (1991), and that wonderful metal piece that Mary Ann had made in Anacortes. It really does resemble the metal fisherman that one sees when one is driving into Ennis, Montana. We have over in another corner, a genuine Prosek. We have some other original Proseks that are in books. And we picked up a lot of clay pieces that are scattered around the house, that help hold up the books. I guess that’s enough.

 

MAF:  Does Tamara have some questions?

 

TB: Only a little bit more just about how did you get started doing auctions? Or how did you find out how to work that whole system, because aren’t most of those on the East coast?

 

PF: We got started on the auction business because our friend Bill Trego, who, by the way, is no longer in publishing. He’s farming, loves it. Bill Trego told us about the New England Auction House and about Pacific Galleries which is located in San Francisco. It seems that one thing runs into another, the same thing is true of catalogs. And of course a wonderful source for looking up books and purchasing books is the Internet. Lots of sources are on the Internet. [Abe Books] is a great source.

 

MAF: Not as much fun as going and browsing in a used bookstore.

 

PF: No matter how much dust or how many cats to keep away the mice that might eat the books.

 

What else have you got, Tamara?

 

TB: No I think that’s pretty much it. I could go with that.

 

PF: I might make one other comment. The “golden age” of book publishing is over. You would lose your shirt if you expected to publish a deluxe limited edition book today. With rare exceptions, you’d lose your shirt. People just aren’t buying that kind of book and I don’t know why. I fish when I travel to far off places with people who could afford to buy the most expensive kind of book and when I have asked them if they bought deluxe limited editions or if they have a library of fishing books, they say, “No.” “Well why not?” “Well I read magazines, I don’t need books. We don’t buy books.” It’s too bad.

 

Our friend, Bill Trego has retired at age 58. What’s he doing? He’s on a sixty-eight acre farm in one of the most expensive communities in New Jersey. The farm is owned by his brother-in-law, a zillionaire plastic surgeon. Bill still has his press and infrequently Meadow Run publishes something. But when I talked to him last week, he said, “I’m glad to be away from all those crazy people, that are suing each other, or whom I’m trying to get a book out [of]. I love my sheep. I have forty-eight now. I’ve got my great big Pyrenees dog that we got from those people in Idaho.” Their Basque dog will grow to be 4 feet high; he’s to protect the sheep from any coyotes that are predators. The sheep don’t talk back. He said, “I have my own creek here, I’ve named it Starlight Creek,” (Harry Middleton wrote a book titled Starlight Creek … that Trego published). “I’ve named this farm Starlight Creek Farm. Everybody around Bedminster, New Jersey,” (that’s where he lives), “is trying to figure out where the hell Starlight Creek is because I’ve been publishing in a local magazine about the virtues of Starlight Farm and my life there!“

 

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO

 

PF: The last thing Bill said to me about the farm was: “It’s a good thing nobody can find Starlight Creek or Starlight Creek Farm because both of those entities exist only in my mind. And you know what my next project is, Paul? It’s to write the biography of Harry Middleton, whom I grew to love so much through his half dozen books. So that’s my project for this coming year.” And then we went on to other things that aren’t germane to what we’re talking about here.

 

END OF INTERVIEW

 

PF: Addendum:  Mary Ann and I continue to collect the best of old and new American fly fishing literature.  We have about 1600 volumes, now, 366 of which are in WWU Libraries Special Collections area.  Eventually all of the books and art will form a nice collection at WWU – a collection gifted to posterity and endowed in perpetuity.  The collecting life is almost as good as fly fishing.