An intensely quiet Scrabble match was underway on the first floor of the Phoenicia Library. Upstairs, Violet Snow led a writing class on discovering ancestors through photos, letters, and keepsakes. In another room, musician, author, and educator Robert Burke Warren worked on a new novel.

For 30 years, the library has supported an eclectic mix of readers, writers, and anglers in Shandaken and surrounding towns. On Wednesday, April 1, one of its most distinctive offerings—the Jerry Bartlett Angling Collection—marked its 30th anniversary.

Like the collection’s opening day in 1996, the anniversary was celebrated with coffee, cake, and snacks.

“The Collection is a public collection. The books and rods are for checking out and using,” said Liz Potter, director of the Phoenicia Library. “Everyone is always welcome to be a part of the community of anglers.”

Tucked on the second floor, the Anglers Parlor resembles a rustic fishing cabin, with pine-paneled walls, red leather chairs, shelves of books, rods, and flies. On the day of the anniversary, Beth Waterman, a co-founder and curator of the collection, sorted through a donation box that included a first edition of Art Flick’s “Streamside Guide” from 1947.

The collection holds hundreds of books, many by local and legendary fly fishers and writers. Among them are George La Branche’s “The Dry Fly and Fast Water,” which documented what flies were catching trout in the Catskills in 1914, and Joan Wulff’s “Fly Casting Techniques” from 1974. There is also Ed Van Put’s newly published “A Flyfisher’s Revelations,” with a foreword by Nick Lyons that describes Van Put as a man with no agenda beyond sharing what he has learned over decades on the water.

At the center of the collection’s story is Jerry Bartlett, the Shandaken angler, educator, conservationist, and licensed guide whose devotion to local streams inspired it.

Bartlett, a former president of Trout Unlimited, advocated for clean, public waterways. In the 1980s and ’90s, he and his wife, Doris, ran Jerry Bartlett’s Catskill Mountain Fly Fishing School and Two Brooks Bed and Breakfast in Shandaken. At home, he collected stream insects, hatched nymphs in an aquarium, and documented their metamorphosis in hand-made hatch charts used to teach anglers at his school.

He also created the Esopus Creek Hotline, a recorded phone line offering up-to-date fishing conditions.

“It was a voice recorder run out of the closet in the back of our house with a dedicated phone line and a recording,” Doris Bartlett said. “Jerry would report what flies were being used and their success or not. I’m sure he also fished them himself.”

Chet Karwatowski, who, like Bartlett, led two local Trout Unlimited chapters, said the hotline became a kind of daily chronicle of the stream.

“Jerry wrote a script,” Karwatowski recalled. “It was a diary of what was happening on the stream. Descriptions of the water temperature, the bug hatches, the Tunnel flow, rain. And the fishing info.”

Bartlett died suddenly in 1995. Afterward, Waterman, a friend of the Bartletts, began looking for a way to honor his passion for teaching people about trout fishing in the Catskills.

“I knew that Phoenicia was pre-eminent in angling history and heard stories about how local angler Ray Smith guided Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. But I don’t fish,” Waterman said. “So, I went to the local library to learn more about the history. I asked if they had any books on local fishing. The librarian replied ‘Yes, but someone checked out all of them and hasn’t returned them.’”

She laughed at the memory.

“I thought, that’s what I’ll do to remember Jerry.”

On April 1, 1996, the opening day of trout season, the Jerry Bartlett Angling Collection opened to the public at the Phoenicia Library, with coffee and sweets. Local builders and carpenters volunteered to construct the room.

“I was happy to draw up a plan and work on the project,” said Geoff Harden, a designer, builder, and musician. “I had known Jerry from fiddling. He had traded fly fishing lessons for violin lessons.”

Then Harden added a line that has lingered as part of Bartlett lore: “Jerry learned Hilton Kelly’s style of Catskill Mountain fiddling, and it was the best fly fishing I ever did.”

Waterman said the collection’s earliest growth came through a bit of serendipity. After buying Charles Traub’s “An Angler’s Album: Fishing in Photography & Literature,” she called the photographer to tell him his book had inspired the project.

“I told him – your book germinated into this idea. Now we’ve created a fishing collection,” she said. “Charlie replied to me, ‘Well, it’s serendipitous because I was just wondering what to do with all the books that I collected in order to research my book!’”

She drove to Washington Square and came back with 80 books.

“That’s how we got started.”

The collection suffered a major setback in 2011, when a fire tore through the library and destroyed much of the Anglers Parlor, including many books and Bartlett’s original Match the Hatch charts.

The community rallied. Donations of books poured in. Then Stephanie Blackman, a web designer, and Mark Loete, an angler and photographer, proposed expanding Bartlett’s hatch-chart concept into a digital resource.

Loete recruited Catskill fly-tyers to recreate Bartlett’s flies and photographed them in close detail.

“I treated each of the flies as jewels using lighting to bring out the opacity or lucidity of each tyer’s creation,” Loete said. “For instance, hair from a calf tail has a similar translucency to a mayfly. You can see every wrap. Every turn.”

With support from the Ashokan Watershed Stream Management Program, Blackman organized and coded the life cycles of 32 insects found on the Esopus Creek. The resulting Match the Hatch website includes taxonomy, seasonal appearances, photos of nymphs and adults, and images of flies designed to imitate them. It also features tying recipes and audio recordings from prominent anglers, writers, and fly-tyers who have spoken at the collection over the years.

Today, organizers say, the Jerry Bartlett Angling Collection is home to the largest circulating collection of angling literature in the country.

That distinction is part of what makes it unusual. Unlike many museums, associations, and research libraries, the Phoenicia Library lets the public borrow the books.

“The Angling Collection is very much like the Esopus Creek. It’s open to the public,” Waterman said.

All a reader needs is a library card.

And, she added, one small act of courtesy: “Just remember to bring the books back!”

Bennett Ratcliff writes about fishing and the outdoors for The Overlook. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.