“God did never make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling,” wrote Izaak Walton, born on this day in 1594, in The Compleat Angler.

Although the fish would likely disagree with this assessment, Walton’s fellow fishers clearly see something in the idea: after the Bible and Shakespeare, The Compleat Angler remains  This is true even though it’s written in the English of 1676, the date of the final edition Walton edited and revised.  Why does it remain so popular?

The Compleat Angler isn’t so much a technical manual on how to fish as it is a book on how to enjoy the countryside and all of its bounty. Essayist William Hazlitt, writing in the 1800s, called it “the best pastoral in the language.”

There were already many manuals about fishing published by Englishmen, literature scholar Marjorie Swann told The Izaak Walton League of America,  on of the country's oldest conservation groups, but “what sets The Compleat Angler apart from these previous how-to books is Walton’s insistence that there’s so much more to being an angler than a technical knowledge of bait and tackle. For Walton, fishing is at once an environmental, social, and spiritual experience.” People still read Walden–why not this?

For the people of his own time, Walton’s book offered a welcome break from the chaos that surrounded them. “When Walton first published The Compleat Angler in 1653 England was in ruins after years of civil war: Walton’s beloved Anglican Church was abolished, his king was executed, and the English landscape was devastated by warfare," Swan says. These circumstances inspired Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, to describe humanity’s “natural state” as “mere war… a war of all men against all men.” But rather than grappling with issues of state brutality and how to create order, Walton wrote a book about the joys and spiritual merits of spending time in the countryside, going about the relatively peaceful practice of “angling” with friends