Ten years ago a group of anglers from around British Columbia wanted to publish a book on fishing that wasn’t at all like the boring how-to manuals being published at the time. They wanted fiction and, believe it or not, poetry as well.
The phone call came in the summer of 1994 from Rob Bell-Irving - the mastermind behind compiling the stories. “We want you to edit the book, what do you think?” he asked. After hearing the list of contributors I was at first intimidated and then intrigued. “Why not?” I said. “You’ll probably just have to check for typos, everything else should be fine,” he added. “And we want it out by Christmas.” Such was the beginning of a self-publishing hell.
Funding was already in place so I figured it would be a relatively easy time going over the manuscripts. Some giants of British Columbia angling literature were submitting stuff, so it would be fun too.
The whole idea of the book was to publish the kinds of fishing stories you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Unfortunately some of the stories would never have been published anywhere else because they were that bad. Some manuscripts were returned with a polite note that said “there wasn’t room.” In a review in The Vancouver Sun on Dec. 15, 1994, Mark Hume probably summed up the book’s contents perfectly.
“Edited by Neil Cameron and compiled by Rob Bell-Irving, you might call this a collection of the good, the bad - and the scary. Some of the writing is brilliant and some of it, well, we’ll be generous and say there are a few stories here that weren’t keepers. “But whatever rough spots there are in The Ardent Angler, the good stories more than make up for.”
That review certainly proved true about my reservations around including some stories in the book. But my directions were to just edit them, everything will be fine.
How many evenings I sought the advice of Van Egan and Paddy Bligh I can’t remember. We were trying to make iron into gold with some of them, but in the end I knew that we only removed most of the rust.
Still, dealing with the impressive list of authors - most of whom I looked very much up to - was a pleasure in itself. In the end it turned out to be what we intended it to be - different and fun. And while the rust-laden stories took hard hits in reviews, the overall acceptance of the book as part of British Columbian angling lore was pleasing.
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Part of the Ardent Angler group of writers met at the Haig-Brown study to help launch the Ardent Angler book 10 years ago. From left are artist/writer Ken Kirkby who designed the cover, Paddy Bligh, Van Egan, Joe Watson, Rory Glennie, Neil Cameron, Denise Kernovich, Art Lingren and Barry Thornton.
Photography © Paul Stobbe
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Tony Eberts of the Vancouver Province published his review Dec. 23 1994. “More has been written about angling than any other sport in the world - so it isn’t easy to come up with a new wrinkle in fishing literature.
It happened this year. A hardcore gaggle of B.C. writers obsessed with fish and fishing and funded by brave investors in Campbell River and points south, produced The Ardent Angler.
It’s a mind-bending mix of adventure, exaggeration, humor, truth, boasting, lying and pure fantasy, but the result is so surprisingly entertaining that even a basketball fan may enjoy it.
The lineup of authors includes some of the most colorful characters in this province’s angling realm, and if you must seek out a “message” in the book it is, I think, simply that fishing is fun.” There were 3,500 books printed and from quick looks around book stores, there are some still available.
What began as a group effort, however, came down to a couple of tired individuals who were tasked with distributing and helping sell the book. In the end the selling and distribution petered out and there are no real tallies of how many books sold.
The last official count was 1,435 in March 1995. Then the effort dwindled out, and The Ardent Angler drifted off alone and untended into the river of British Columbia literature.
