Speckled Troutby John Burroughs is richly illustrated by Steven C. Daiber with 43 pencil drawings, 2 watercolors of trout and a Birch bark collage. Speckled Trout is 7 x 9 inches in an edition of 300 books, hand bound in a black walnut dyed paper with the text label in birch bark, and is enclosed in a light yellow handmade paper case.

A deluxe edition of 30, hand bound in a handmade green paper with a birch bark label image of a trout, includes 3 original prints: 2 colored woodcuts of a brook trout and a map of the Beaverkill watershed in the Catskill Mountains printed from 5 blocks with additional hand coloring. The woodcuts are printed on Sekisho and bound into the book. The wood engraving of a fisherman is printed in dark green on Sekisho and tipped in. The deluxe edition comes in a clam shell box. Speckled trout is available here.

Wood cut prints from the book are also for sale. Salvelinus fontinalis is printed damp on Arches cover in an edition of 70 with the first 31 with text from Speckled Trout for $100, the remainder at $65. The map is an edition of 120 on Guttenburg laid at $75.

Speckled Trout first appeared in the October 1870 issue of Atlantic Monthly and again in 1879 in a collection of essays- Locusts and Wild Honey. John Burroughs was an American naturalist, completing 23 volumes of essays of nature writing. His career spanned a friendship with Walt Whitman in Washington DC during the Civil War to camping trips with Roosevelt, Edison and Muir in the first decades of the 20^th century.

“The newest artist-bookmaker, and surely one of the most original and unique, is Steven Daiber.

. . . a treasure for serious collectors.”            Nick Lyons, Lyons Publishing, New York, NY

“Burroughs captures to perfection the true flavor of old-time roughing it, replete with clouds of black flies, spates of rain, trackless woods, cold nights, rough bark shelters, and literally bags of fresh-caught brookies. Daiber’s tough but delicate artwork enhances the account with haunting images so vivid you can almost smell the wood smoke . . . a slim, virile, handsome book no serious collector of angling literature should be without.”

Robert F. Jones

The trout is dark and obscure above, but behind this foil there are wondrous tints that reward the believing eye. Those that seek him in his wild remote haunts are quite sure to get the full force of the somber and uninviting aspects—the wet, the cold, the toil, the broken rest and the huge savage, uncompromising nature, etc. But the true angler sees farther than these, and is never thwarted of his legitimate reward by them.

John Burroughs