Over the years I have accumulated, no doubt like many reading this, a large number of books from angling's great literature - a literature that, in the English language alone, goes back to 1496.

These books are not regimented. Indeed, they stand in what might be called surprise-me order, which is to say the kind of order that they might themselves have arrived at if they had been pitched from a high-flying plane and allowed to land where they would, miraculously end-on and upright. I have spent many hours, over the past couple of weeks, trying to improve things.

Now sorting old books, like sorting old photographs, ought to be easy and quick: we decide the order we want them in and then put them into it. That is the theory. The practice is that many books, like many old photographs, cannot simply be picked up and put down again. Old photographs can trigger so many memories that sorting half a dozen can take all morning. Books undisturbed for years also demand time.

Many insist on being dusted off and thumbed through, there and then. That, anyway, is the way it is for those who, like me, keep slipping photographs and bits of paper and things in envelopes between the pages of their books, for theoretical proper filing later on. Every new sortie into libraries like ours brings with it revelations and excitements.

And so it is that, over the past couple of weeks, I have become reacquainted with the shuck of the first mayfly I saw hatch from the River Kennet in 1978; with a sketch of an unusual caddis fly I found when autopsying a trout from Grafham Water a couple of years later; with a fading picture of myself fishing the very pool on the River Erriff in Connemara where I caught my first salmon in 1976; with a wonderful poem about movement and light written by my now long-married daughter Lisa, when she was eight years old; with a letter from a schoolboy in Ireland asking if anyone ever fished with bubble-floats on the chalk streams, because bubble-floats worked brilliantly on the rivers near his home.

Week two unveiled a document printed entirely in Russian that I had signed in Murmansk without having a clue what it said; a fishing permit from Alaska that had printed on the back of it details of how I could communicate distress-and-rescue messages if I ever found myself flying my plane and unable to land it; photographs of friends and miscellaneous fish; the original sketch of a trout's eyeball drawn for us by Professor Bill Muntz of Stirling University, when John Goddard and I were working on our book The Trout and the Fly; sadly, an obituary or two - and much else besides. They resurrected thoughts and memories of every kind.

I have room for just one. Tucked into a copy of Arthur Ransome's Rod and Line, a wonderful collection of essays written when Ransome was fishing correspondent of The Manchester Guardian 80-odd years ago, I found some letters from Sir Michael Hordern, the actor. Sir Michael, an impassioned fly-fisherman, had made a series of beguiling television films based on Rod and Line for the new-born Channel 4. I had reviewed the series for The Sunday Times, he had dropped me a note about my review, I had replied and a warm correspondence had ensued.

A year or two later I found myself in his company. Quite late into the evening, after the wine had worked its usual magic on the group, fishing stories had begun to flow. We had all the usual stuff, preposterous yarns of this and that, tales of great fish landed and lost. Then Sir Michael's turn came and he told a story that, he insisted, was true. He had, he said, needed to be in the theatre a couple of weeks before and, it being a pleasant day, he had decided to go there on foot. On the way he passed a fishmonger's shop and, glancing in the window, he spotted fish in it that looked familiar. He paused to look at them and his eye fell on a price tag stuck into one of them. It said ‘salmon trout'.

“Well, of course”, said Hordern, at once in full theatrical flow, eyes popping and whiskers aquiver, “there's no such thing as a salmon trout. They meant sea trout, sea trout. I looked at my watch and thought, ‘I've just got time to put this chap right.'”

He had, he said, gone into the shop and asked for the manager. A few moments later a man had appeared and, on seeing him, had given him a long, wide-eyed stare. Hordern, used to being stared at, ignored the look and drew the man to the window. “Look”, he said, pointing to the slab. “These fish. You've got them marked ‘salmon trout'. There's no such thing as a salmon trout. They're sea trout. That's what they are, sea trout. You need to change the label.”

The fishmonger, a cockney, he said, started to nod. “Then I turned to leave and I could feel his eyes following me all the way. I'd scarcely reached the door when I heard him whisper to someone, “D'you know, I'd have sworn that was Michael 'Ordern if I 'adn't known 'e was dead.”

Well, now Hordern is dead but his story is not. Nor, thanks to my library, are memories of the Irish ghillie who liked to eat mayflies, of the trout that jumped on to the bank the instant I hooked it, of the day I hooked three fish at the same time on Chew Valley lake and landed the lot. And, and, and. Yes, there's much to be said for slipping stuff into old fishing books - especially when it bobs up, later.

Brian Clarke's fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month

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