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Thanks to their friendship, UNH's Special Collections is now home to handwritten notes from Carson Hubbard's post-war stint as a spy, part of a larger espionage collection Wheeler describes as unique among American libraries. "Many have books," he says, "but except for Yale, virtually none of them has any unpublished papers."

Carson Hubbard's papers, along with photos, articles, documentary films--and a collection of central African art that resides in the UNH art gallery--provide a valuable perspective on mid-20th-century Africa, as experienced by a remarkable woman who led a remarkable life.

FISH TALES
The Douglas and Helena Milne Angling Collection

Bill Ross was knee-deep in fly fishing books, in the midst of reorganizing the library's premier collection, when he met Helena Milne for the first and only time. Engrossed in his work, he didn't even notice when she entered the room. But when he glanced up, the donor herself was standing just feet away from the hundreds of precious books stacked on the floor.

Moments later, Milne had tears in her eyes--not because of the state of the collection, but because Ross had opened for her an oversized special edition, finely printed and beautifully illustrated. It was something he had recently purchased with funds from the endowment set up by Milne. "She thought it was something her late husband, Douglas, would have loved," says Ross.

The angling books given to UNH in the 1960s by the Milnes, both avid fishermen, marked the official start of UNH's Special Collections. Thanks to the endowment, the original collection has more than doubled, making it one of the largest of its kind in the United States. Today, more than 3,000 of the 3,500 volumes have been processed by the Special Collections staff and can be searched online by key word, title, author or subject.

Especially rich in materials relating to fly fishing for trout and Atlantic salmon, the collection includes a vast array of books on fly tying, rod making and stream tactics. The most famous book in the collection is The Compleat Angler, written in 1653 by Izaak Walton, who is considered the Shakespeare of angling literature.

Fly fishing, it turns out, even has its radical side. The collection includes an original copy of a 1739 sermon by Reverend Joseph Seccombe that was likely a shock to most churchgoers. The Sabbath, he maintained, is not merely for rest and prayer. Diversion, especially the recreation of fishing, is beneficial to the human spirit, he claimed. Not surprisingly, Reverend Seccombe was an avid fisherman.

The compatibility of fishing and reverence was, apparently, not an entirely new concept. Before Seccombe, before Walton, even, there was Dame Juliana Berners, a prioress at a Benedictine abbey in England. Her book, A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, was penned in 1496 and is thought to be the earliest book on the subject.

Nearly six centuries later, modern fishing enthusiasts can visit UNH's Special Collections and study the words of Dame Juliana. The fly-fishing prioress describes various fish types, such as the carp, "a wicked fish to catch," and the salmon, "the grandest fish that any man can go after in freshwater." She suggests which bait to use for which conditions--"young frogs with their feet cut off," for example, or "a worm that breeds between the bark and the trunk of the oak." In short, she makes a convincing case for why "the finest sport is fishing with a rod, line, and hook." And who can argue with a nun?

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