Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days

In 1983, Yellow Pages in the United Kingdom ran a television advert featuring an elderly gentleman visiting bookshops looking for a copy of a book called Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley. After several failed visits to shops, he finds a copy of the book using Yellow Pages and the telephone. The advert ends with the man identifying himself as the author, J. R. Hartley. As a result, several bookshops and the British Library received a large number of requests for a copy of the non-existent book.[1]

Angling expert Michael Russell had written a book on fly fishing and chose to have it published under the name of J. R. Hartley citing the cult status of the advert. The book was published as Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days in 1991 by Stanley Paul.[2] The publishers hired Norman Lumsden, who played J. R. Hartley in the advert, to promote the book as the public face of the author.[1] Despite Russell being credited as the sole author, there have been claims that other people helped him write it.[3] The book was popular and sold 130,000 copies over the Christmas period alone in the United Kingdom.[2] As a result, it reached the top of the Christmas bestseller list in 1991.[4][5]

The popularity of the book led to two sequels, J. R. Hartley Casts Again: More Memories of Angling Days and Golfing by J. R. Hartley.[2] In 2011, BookFinder.com announced that Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days was the 17th most sought-after out-of-print book worldwide.[6] In 2012, a bookshop in Tonbridge, Kent, was broken into by an intoxicated person who called the police and told them he was reading Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley.[7]