Book of The Black Bass - Reviews

Reviews

• In his book My Angling Friends, Fred Mather, editor of Field and Stream, devoted a whole chapter to Henshall and said this about his book:

But his book, "The Book of the Black Bass," will be all the monument and "obituary" that any man might crave. It is the most distinctively American of any fishing book ever published. It deals with a grand pair of American game fishes which had received scant attention from angling authors; not more than had been accorded to the perch and similar fish until Henshall made the declaration that: "Pound for pound, the black bass is the gamiest fish that swims." Then Americans began to regard these fishes in a new light and Henshall was dubbed "the apostle of the black bass."

• The 1904 revised 2nd Edition received this review from the New York Times:

James A. Henshall's name will always be associated with the Black Bass. Not alone is the sportsman indebted to him, but the ichthyologist as well for the knowledge of this fish. ...In a masterly manner the author gives the fullest instruction concerning tools, tackle and implements to be used in black bass fishing, and at the conclusion there is to be read a chapter on fly fishing in its broadest sense.

The last word the author has to say is: "Always kill your fish as soon as taken from the water, and ever be satisfied with a moderate creel." In the volume there are to be read the names of many men of science and fisherman, American born, whose memories we cherish.

• Robert Page Lincoln, a noted bass fisherman and angling author of the mid-20th century wrote in his Black Bass Fishing (1952):

Once upon a time in this country there lived an eminent fish culturist, angling authority and traveler. His name was James Alexander Henshall... Henshall was a bass fisherman all his life. Henshall fished the length and breadth of the black bass range in this country and wrote a famous treatise, Book of the Black Bass. He is indeed, the father of bass fishing in this country.

• Ted Kesting, once the editor of Sports Afield compiled Bass Fishing (1962) and introduced Henshall in a chapter entitled 200 Years of Bass Fishing.

And Dr. Henshall wrote a volume in 1881 quite simply entitled Book of the Black Bass which practically clubbed the angling world into accepting bass as one of the world's great sporting fishes. "Inch for inch, pound for pound, the gamest fish that swims," the doctor said in his now-famous dictum. This was the statement that made bass socially acceptable, which they had not been before.

• In American Fly Fishing - A History (1996), Paul Schullery said this about Henshall:

Henshall's writings, especially his Book of the Black Bass (1881), were the best, most comprehensive and scientifically authoritative works on bass for more than sixty years (and how often can that be said of a popular fishing book?), and he championed a good cause, alerting thousands of fly fishers to the sporting possibilities of the basses just as those fish were finding homes in new waters in many parts of the country.

• Will Ryan, author of Smallmouth Strategies for the Fly Rod (1996) wrote about Henshall:

What distinquished Henshall's prose, however was less the technical subject matter than his enthusiasm for the sporting quality of the black bass. "Inch for inch and pound for pound, the gamest fish that swims" does not exactly stand as an equivocal statement, even given the rhetorical nature of magazine writing in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It may be the most quoted line in American sportfishing. And with it, Henshall ensured his place in fishing history as the father of black bass fishing.