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 erald Eades Bentley notes in the preface of the 1956 reprint edition that the last surviving copy of The Arte of Angling has suffered "hard usage; perhaps even days in the pocket of a fisherman." He continues: "One wonders if all the other copies... were worn into complete extinction by the hands of other fishermen."
Eloise Palfort, in her "Notes on the Wynkyn de Worde Editions of the Boke of St. Albans and Its Separates," proposes a similr explanation for the rarity of small-format pocket-sized volumes and instances an edition of The Treatyse in quarto size dated circa 1532 to 1534, of which there is only one extant copy.[1] She states: The small format volumes, the quarto size de Worde found so profitable... and suitably adapted for his treatise on sports, proved for the bibliographer of today le modèle fatal. Because of its size, works of this type were easily lost, and copies are either extremely rare, or the record is narrowed down to unique copies...[2] The vulnerability of pocket-sized volumes is underlined by the fact that in a larger format, there are at least seventeen known surviving copies of the earlier (1496) edition of the Boke of St. Albans, which includes The Treatyse.[3]
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