The Complete Fisherman’s Catalog
Written and compiled by Harmon Henkin. Published by J. B. Lippincott, 1977. Available used via Amazon and other online stores.
Has there ever been a fishing catalog like it? The Complete Fisherman’s Catalog is a treasure chest of reliable information about fishing tackle that also takes a slantwise look at America through the lens of angling. It was a useful compendium for the budget-minded angler circa 1977, but it can also be read as a kind of sociological treatise on the state of the art.
It was put together by Harmon Henkin, a renegade free spirit who is perhaps best understood as the Lester Bangs of fly fishing. Like the late Mr. Bangs, a famous and irascible rock critic who died much too early, Henkin took on a stodgy establishment (fly fishing) and kicked out the jams.
Henkin blew into Montana with a lot of other hippies back in the counterculture days and settled in to do some serious f ishing while letting his freak flag fly. If you view the sixties as having begun at middecade — and ending ten years later — then this is a document very much of those times: antiestablishment, slightly revolutionary, somewhat off-kilter, but full of enthusiasm, optimism, and even idealism.
In prose that is always lively, refreshing, and edgy, Henkin, with a little help from his posse of contributors, delves into the contradictions of a bourgeois sport that became more democratized every day. He rates the equipment with the consumer in mind, not the manufacturer, and in addition to giving frank evaluations of most of the equipment on the market, enlivens his catalog with stories, essays, vignettes, personal asides, curious anecdotes, and heaps of practical information. It makes terrific reading for armchair anglers and on-stream revolutionaries.
Henkin’s catalog was intended to be a sourcebook for tackle and accessories for all methods of sportfishing, not just f ly fishing, and it truly covers the waterfront: spinning and bait casting, ice fishing, surf casting, offshore angling — you name it, it’s there. It opens with an epigraph from Russell Baker, taken from one of his “Observer” columns in the New York Times, and it sets the tone for all that comes: “Modern fishing is as complicated as flying a B-53 to Tacoma. Several years of preliminary library and desk work are essential just to be able to buy equipment without humiliation.” Henkin sets out to demystify the market and make sense of it all.
“What sums up the Catalog?” he asks. “The unusual and the offbeat. The best buys and most practical gear. The ultimate commodities whether in equipment or writers We don’t have anything to sell in the Catalog. Like other anglers we are consumers of tackle and want our money’s worth… Let’s face it. All anglers may be created equal, but they aren’t treated equally in the manufacture and merchandizing of fishing tackle.”
Henkin wasn’t kidding about the talent he tapped. He queried a hundred angling experts and regional authorities for their views on the best brands of fishing tackle and commissioned several well-known angling writers to contribute a few words of their own. We are treated to two full-blown essays from the artist and angler Russell Chatham, the first on a new material for fly rods called graphite and another on the most suitable fly tackle for pursuing steelhead and king salmon. In the book section of the catalog, which is very extensive, the novelist Thomas McGuane (Ninety-Two in the Shade) pays a visit to Vancouver Island in British Columbia to interview Roderick Haig-Brown.
But mostly it is Henkin doing the talking, and he raises the craft of product reviewing to the giddy heights of literature. He was a man obsessed over every detail of his tackle, and he sweated the small stuff. He was a moralist. He wanted to know what was being hidden from us.
Henkin sends up the snobbery of bamboo (“an object of worship”), early graphite rods (“They could get your fly out but the process was like a banzai pilot on his last mission”), and disses bass tournaments (“a sad commentary on the way we live”), while giving equal time to a contributor who digs them.
Henkin tells us about his misadventures trying to swap tackle and his many screwups onstream, such as the day he mistook an irrigation ditch for Rock Creek, a famous trout stream near Missoula. His buddy Richard Eggert supplies an essay on how to avoid getting burned on the used cane market. And Henkin takes his digs at legendary rod makers such as Jim Payne and Everett Garrison, whose “impractical” rods command huge prices on the vintage market, despite their unsuitability for most fishing situations. “The problem with almost all vintage rods is that they are either very tippy, which makes for line overloading and a difficulty in controlling free-floating nymphs, or they have very soft wet fly actions, which are simply ridiculous to handle.”
A Marxist, Henkin seems fascinated by the sociology of angling and casts a gimlet eye on our free market. “It is usually not discussed but the average national income of fly anglers ranks higher than the average incomes of other anglers such as spincasters, bait casters, and trollers. . . . What this means practically is simple: The higher the social and economic scale of a group, the better the variety and quality and equipment offered to that group. Taste, quality, and economics are intertwined.”
But mostly, Henkin is out to have fun. And more often than not, we find ourselves nodding in agreement at some of his more outrageous and heretical pronouncements. He finds Fly Fisherman too middle of the road. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, is “a longish novel that illustrates very well the dangers of going out after lunkers with inadequate tackle.” United We Stand: “For many anglers, joining a conservation group is as routine as giving to charity After the cash changes hands, they might go to the yearly banquet, featuring a fishing superstar making the circuit, or even attend a meeting or two. But that’s about it.”
There’s no telling what you might come across in this overstuffed grab bag. There’s even a detective story, written by Henkin, that runs throughout the pages. “The Last Hatch: A Fishing Mystery” begins at the front of the catalog, with a body discovered in a spring creek that empties into the Bitterroot River, and ends at the back with the solution to the murder.
This bit of tomfoolery is a reminder that Henkin was also the author of a gonzo thriller called Crisscross (Putnam, 1976) that featured a radical, pot-smoking hippie who goes on the lam after being set up for a murder. Pursued by sinister forces, Spencer William Duval flees across the country while smoking weed, dodging bad guys, and getting laid frequently. One subplot has him picked up on a train to Montana by a hot woman who is really a CIA tail, in a scene lifted straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Unwisely, the author set all the action in midwinter, so there’s no fishing, but Henkin has a grand time making fun of contemporary culture and the sorry state of our republic, and the novel serves as a kind of socialist primer for what went wrong.
Some of this leaks into the fishing catalog, as well. Henkin was an outspoken commie who let everyone know it. (There’s even an old Wobbly who turns up in his crime novel, which shows where his sympathies lay.) The photograph on the book jacket shows him in a beard and a Mao cap, He looks a little like an anarchist in an old Hearst cartoon.
But Henkin leavened his anger with humor and never overburdened read-ers with doctrinaire messaging. He was mainly out to inform, entertain, and amuse. He called hunting and fishing “a form of fighting oppression.” Friends hoped his breakthrough novel might lead him to further book contracts and maybe a gig in Hollywood as a screenwriter, but it was not to be. Henkin lost control of his pickup truck on a highway outside of Missoula and died instantly in the crash. The world of fly fishing lost another free spirit. His catalog lives on, a testament to the spirit of angling. And maybe to watch a trout rising to a mayfly is to watch all politics die.
