The most significant events in the history of books on the 15th of December
1683: Izaak Walton dies. He was a biographer who wrote about the lives of a number of key seventeenth-century poets, including the Metaphysical Poets John Donne and George Herbert. However, it is for his 1653 book The Compleat Angler that Walton is chiefly remembered. Charles Lamb recommended the Angler to Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘It breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of the heart.