On Fishing
By Brian Clarke
HarperCollins £20, 592 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon: A Record of the Largest Atlantic Salmon Ever Caught
By Fred Buller
Constable £50, 592 pages
FT bookshop price: £38

How to Fish
By Chris Yates
Penguin £8.99, 242 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

All anglers are, to some extent, unhinged. Their close relatives know this well and accept it as the price of their company. Others, lacking excuses of marriage or genetics to indulge the angler’s obsession, tend to look upon them as harmless eccentrics, to be bracketed alongside those who like to build working scale-models of steam engines in the shed. If one accepts that most men – and generally it is men – fail to grow up completely, then a fascination with fishing is an innocuous channel for the perennial currents of childhood.

At least, that’s what anglers hope the world will think. The example of Thomas Birch, an 18th-century biographer, historian, editor and author of A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, suggests that is not always a safe assumption. As Brian Clarke’s book, On Fishing, recalls, Birch’s weak spot was his passion for angling, an enthusiasm so strong he took to dressing up as a tree, to “take root” next to his favourite stream and beguile the fish with his powers of disguise. He continued in this manner for some years until “ridiculed out of it by friends”.

It may look bizarre to so-called “friends”, but in the mind of the fishing nut such behaviour has a logic. Some 250 years later, fishing-induced eccentricities persist, only nowadays the truly committed fishing obsessives use radio-controlled, sonar-equipped bait boats to transport cargoes of tasty morsels out to where the fish are cruising, and then remotely command a hatch to swing open and send the appetisers down to the quarry below. But some of the more basic eccentricities persist – some match fishermen, for example, have been known to warm maggots in their mouths so that they will wriggle with greater vigour and attract the fishes’ attention more reliably.

Eccentricity lives in the gulf between the individual’s view of his own behaviour (unimpeachably normal) and society’s view of the same (at best slightly odd, at worst a threat to the values we hold dear). Anglers find themselves on the wrong side of this divide because their sport’s fundamental attraction is solitude and escape – from work, family, commitments, worries, other people, the sensation of time itself. Both Clarke and Chris Yates in How to Fish write intimately about the rapt oblivion that anglers experience. “Being so absorbed in the present moment I soon lose track of the average hour,” writes Yates, “yet can instead appreciate a different perception of time as I fish through moments that are sometimes astonishingly stretched and others that are impossibly condensed.” But Clarke knows that it’s only ever a temporary escape to “that place where the physical passes through me like ether”. Sooner or later he will always be dragged back to the present: “The world takes form again, sounds separate and become distinct again, and I look at my watch. Ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. I do not know where I have been.”

There are many reasons why people write books about fishing. For some, it is to teach practical methods to catch more fish. Over the years, many thousands of such books on all branches of the sport have been published, especially since the 1960s, mirroring the growth of the fishing tackle industry into a big business. But even though Yates chose to call his book How to Fish, it is not the how-to books that last, except in rare cases. The books that endure are those that speak about why we catch fish. Almost all are memoirs in one form or another. Their attraction lies in their ability to reawaken in us that sense of total absorption we feel on the river bank, and to connect the solitary reflections of individual anglers into an enthused and exultant whole. We are not alone; there are others just as unhinged as we are. And the great fishing books seduce us into believing that however inept we might be as anglers, there is a greater point to our presence by the water.

For most of the modern history of angling in Britain, the version of the sport that an angler practised precisely reflected his social class. The posh were fly fishermen and went after trout and salmon on rivers that ran through private estates controlled by fellow gentlemen of the shires. They employed keepers and would not have resorted to using bait in pursuit of a fish. At the other end of the scale was coarse fishing. These anglers did not have country houses, and used only bait in pursuit of much less grand species of fish, such as roach, perch and chub, species that their upper class counterparts would not have fed to their domestic animals.

Most of the great angling memoirs of past decades have been written by the former group, devotees of fly fishing. Few people could tell you which foreign secretary uttered that famous phrase, “the lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” But the fishing community remembers Viscount Grey of Falloden for one of angling’s finest memoirs, Fly Fishing, published in 1899. Likewise John Waller Hills, sometime financial secretary to the Treasury, is recalled mainly for A Summer on the Test, possibly the greatest book ever written on trout fishing in England’s majestic southern chalk streams, first published in 1924.

The latest crop of fishing books offers powerful reminders of how far we have come from the stratified world of gentlemen and plebs that Grey and Hills inhabited. How to Fish is one of the best books on angling published for many years, and takes its place comfortably alongside these fine memoirs of the past. Yet it is a hymn of love devoted entirely to coarse fishing, specifically the delights of catching the stripy perch using worms for bait. In today’s classless society, a book devoted to the sport of the common man can attain the heights of lyricism previously reserved for the noble art of fly fishing without appearing in any way incongruous. We are all coarse fishermen now.

Clarke’s anthology, mainly culled from his columns for The Times, makes no secret of his preference for fly fishing over its coarse counterpart. But he nonetheless eschews all the overtones of class and superiority that his choice would have implied in the past. He is happy to dangle the maggot when the situation demands, and sees no intrinsic superiority in casting the dry fly. This is nowhere better expressed than in the chapter entitled “Yippee!” where we find Clarke realising a lifelong ambition to catch a really big grayling (a singularly lovely fish often found in British trout streams). He ends the day with two huge specimens of 3lb-plus, the first taken on an aristocratic fly, the second with a proletarian piece of sweetcorn. The purists may shudder, but Clarke’s non-judgmental approach is a delight. Fishing needs more of this.

If Clarke’s and Yates’s books remind us how fishing (and society) has changed over the 20th century, then The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon, by Fred Buller, kindles a warm nostalgia for the world we have left behind. This book – decades in the making – is remarkable for many reasons. On a superficial level, it stands as a defining statement of angling’s utter eccentricity; the nerdish obsession that every truly addicted angler will instantly recognise. It is also a curiously atypical example of its species: if anglers are, as the cliché would have us, forever exaggerating the size of our captures, then Buller’s book sets its face resolutely against this tendency and goes in search of verifiable facts and exact dimensions.

Buller starts from a simple conviction: “I believe that to catch a salmon weighing over 50lb on fly is the highest distinction that a salmon fisherman can achieve in his or her lifetime.” His attempt to chronicle all the Atlantic salmon weighing more than 50lb that have been caught, if not in the world then certainly across northern Europe, is itself a gargantuan endeavour. This extraordinarily loving and detailed piece of research took its octogenarian author across Europe, trawling archives and hunting through forgotten corners of libraries and attics in pursuit of these giants. If catching a 50lb salmon is the achievement of a lifetime, then how much greater is it to rescue from oblivion so many tales of triumph?

The result is a wealth of wonderful stories and pictures that recount the capture of 469 of the largest salmon on record, including Alexander Mackintosh’s 54lb 8oz fish from the River Tay in Scotland in 1765 (No. 106 in order of size), probably the first time a fish this big was taken on rod and line. Some never were taken, at least that way. Buller relates the story of Bishop Browne’s Mythical 70-Pounder (No. 425), which the cleric played for more than 10 hours one day in June 1870 (again on the River Tay) before his line snapped and the fish escaped. One can only imagine what oaths the bishop struggled to restrain in that moment of horror and dejection. Two days later, the great beast was caught in the Tay nets with his fly still in its jaws.

The picture of this magnificent fish is one of the highlights of Buller’s book, and it is in the pictures – grainy black and white photographs of men (and a handful of women) dressed in the outdoor fashions of their day, posing next to giant Atlantic salmon – that the real story of Buller’s domesday book is told. It is a story tinged with sadness.

So many of the pictures are striking because they are old – the golden age of the giant salmon was in the early decades of the 20th century, before too many of the clear rivers to which they were returning became tainted by pollution and environmental change, and before industrial netting made the odds against their arrival too great. The same industrial expansion that gave us our modern, prosperous and classless society – where fly fishermen can no longer claim natural precedence over their coarse cousins – has brought to an end the heyday of nature’s most aristocratic fish.

It is this sad realisation that plays equally in the final chapter of Clarke’s book, where he sounds a melancholy warning to his fellow anglers as environmental degradation and the spectre of public opposition to fishing cloud the horizon. “In the developments I have described, I can see the potential for a collision coming faster than it need: a collision between a sport moving in one direction and a public opinion moving in the other.”

Clarke’s warning is well timed – angling does indeed face a challenging future. But it faces the challenges with a remarkably able band of advocates and, in Clarke, a writer with the sense to recognise his sport’s most vital attributes: “This bemused and generally benign attitude on the part of non-fishing folk towards angling is, it is worth noting, one of our current greatest strengths. We may be slightly dotty – but we are harmless.”

Andrew Davis is editor of FT Weekend