Experts abound. Some expound: educate, inspire, and encourage, or, as happens on an inexplicably popular cooking show, berate, humiliate, and throw tantrums that I would be happy to watch if it were promised that some victim would brain the host with a sizzling pan and — following a commercial break — grill the remains as an entrée, “A sweet but slightly salty hash, complemented by an exquisite shallot and cilantro cream . . . highly imaginative approach . . . immensely satisfying and . . . tangy. ” While egoists pretend to expertise,
evidence of this personality trait does not prove that expertise is absent. Or that displays of ego are unpopular. Not since Mohammad Ali raised a forefinger has unleashed narcissism offended an overwhelming majority of the American public. It’s possible that fans of these preening cocks are wonderfully gracious, willing to ignore symptoms of syphilitic dementia; others may believe that anybody who manifests and gets away with Caligula manners is a “winner” on whose side they belong.
Of course we are talking about fly fishing, a human endeavor like any other, even if we appreciate the sport precisely because it isn’t quite that. We have plenty of sages. Some are widely recognized, others known regionally or locally, even more admired by small circles of fans, one or two worshiped mainly by themselves.
I’ve been lucky to fish with a dozen or two of the first three groups and know or have known twice that many reasonably well, many of these also members of writerly tribes whose names I’ve omitted here so as not to drop them. At International Fly Tackle Dealer Shows and other fly-fishing events, I’ve met and talked to scores more, often while I’m sober, and while it’s possible some mistook me for a Pakistani sales rep — because I often wore a black sport coat — that did not diminish the value of the wisdom that my people and I received from them.
Add all these experts together. Multiply by a double-digit number. Carry a nine, The remainder is roughly equal to the experts whose advice I’ve perused while reviewing media for Fly Rod & Reel, starting in 1997 (we think). As many times as I’ve given away, I’ve never actually sold anything — although I traded some once — so in excess of two thousand volumes line walls of my office, a pair of bedrooms and a hallway. Many, many more fill plastic bins stacked three deep in my garage, attic, and basement. A moderate quake would dump me onto an Atlantic salmon library where I’ll be crushed from above by caddis and mayfly reference books illustrated in Taiwan.
If I haven’t consumed every sentence in every one of these, we’re still talking tens of thousands of pages, millions of words, untold numbers of photos, drawings, and diagrams. Blessed with the memory of the average border collie — instead of one of those inbred shih tzus that might someday learn its name — I’d be wonderfully wise today, if not an expert in techniques and skills, at least uber informed by fly-fishing information released during this enormously productive era. Of course, it’s also possible that I might already fill an urn etched with the epitaph “Died of Chapter Four Primer Redundancy: The Reel.”
Truth is . . . while I pretend to toss off my sustaining ignorance with a cavalier tail shake, it’s long been a source of embarrassment and guilt. On the occasions when I’m asked to recommend a usefully informative book, such as a primer, it seems to me I should have read something other than The Curtis Creek Manifesto, as unique and engaging as Sheridan Anderson’s classic will remain until the 1 percent finish harvesting us and ISIS arrives in force. (They’re still negotiating that schedule.) Then again, glancing up at my groaning shelves, my feet resting on a stack of books, I suddenly ask . . .
Who could keep up? You’d have to be half Cray computer. I really do wonder if the number of fly-fishing books published since 1990 eclipses all the titles released before that. The explosion of interest in fly fishing after The Movie, the perception of newcomers as a monied market, suddenly affordable color printing, and a still mostly nascent Internet led to fantastic abundance. For awhile, this rising tide also floated essay collections and fiction, but over time, and with a recession, publishers moved away from these, filling their lists mainly with four-color how-tos, fly-tying manuals and collections, regional guides, and nine-pound tomes dedicated to cool destinations and glory species. Trout trout trout, salmon and steelhead. And the surge of interest in warmwater and saltwater pursuits expanded a cookie-and-slice-o’-pie market into three-tier cakes a la mode with earning potential.
Now?
A real publishing player, with a grasp of hard numbers, would have both a wider and better-focused perspective. Unfortunately, way more than half those I tapped over time have left or been forced out of the game as publishing houses cut lists or collapsed and magazines downsized radically or folded and as surprisingly few moved into expensive Web sites that mainstay houses created, but that never succeeded as well as others built on shoestring budgets, sometimes by people with little in the way of traditional media backgrounds.
I did, however, find one expert who is thriving and who agreed to comment if I refrained from using his name. I’ll call him Will, and suffice it to say that when it comes to fly-fishing books, if I have my finger on the pulse of a lesser vein, he’s pressing a palm against the industry’s heart.
And the first thing he said surprised me. “There are as many fly-fishing books coming out today as ever.”
Seriously? He goes back a lot further than I do.
“And they’re worse than ever,” he laughed.
That surprised me, too. But he sees lots of cheaply produced, specialized how-where-to books that seldom arrive in my mailbox — large-format short books, quickly and slickly produced in color, but often barely edited, if at all.
In fact, these have been around for quite some time, providing information to select groups who never get just what they want. More recently, however, he’s also seeing a small slew of self-published essay collections. These fill a void left by publishers leery of lyrical work. I’ve received several scores of them and found a dozen worth reviewing, but that’s partly because I’m inclined to forgive the kinds of sins that appear in high-quality work that doesn’t get a professional editor’s attention.
My source is not as much of a fan. “The ease that people can take a book to print has been both limiting and liberating,” he says. Absent a critical eye to comment on content — somebody to look out for the reader’s interest — anything goes, and things can get uneven. Truth is, few writers can polish their own prose perfectly, including some who famously insist on doing so, and even those who can nicely massage other authors’ work struggle to edit drafts they’ve rewritten over and over. I know, because I get prepublication galley proofs that are sometimes littered with mistakes and that always arrive with a caution that errors will be fixed before printing.
With all that comes the hazard of the earnest and well-intended volunteer editor. Many offer terrific support and brilliant insights that authors praise in acknowledgments, but a nonfishing English lit pal might miss things or prefer too-Oxford English, and a seriously literate spouse may spare the red-pen rod to preserve a marriage. I’ve taken on many of these projects myself, and my favorite was a wise guide’s who brought in a handwritten manuscript blessed by his priest, who I’m pretty just closed his eyes and prayed that a paragraph break would appear, somewhere, on one of the pages.
But who reads these books, and how do they find them?
There’s the rub. Once upon a time, fly fishers bought books mainly in fly shops. With fewer around, partly because of Internet sales and with those that are left a lot less likely to risk space on books that might not sell, readers look instead to the Internet, where they also find videos and CDs that teach skills such as tying and casting using moving pictures. Meanwhile, my expert insists that the makeup of fly fishers is changing as “old guys who want to read old guys” fade and a younger generation “might like to see five minutes of exciting fishing, the kind of thing they think they create on their Go-Pro.”
Which brings us back to experts who write books and all kinds of every media. “Isn’t every expert an egotist?” asks Will with a rhetorical laugh. But he quickly blunts the edge of that cut. “Actually, in fly fishing, that’s not usually the case.” And then, because Will’s subtle, he says, “Take that Art Flick for example, seems like a hell of a modest guy.” He also happens to be subject of a biography I recently reviewed and that Russ Chatham published, Art Flick: Catskill Legend. A Remembrance of His Life and Times, by Roger Keckeissen. Art Flick was the author of a match-the-hatch blockbuster put out in 1947 that eventually sold over one hundred thousand copies.
It’s a number that trumps anything we’ll see soon. While there’s something to said for colorful leaders who push new ideas rousing our imaginations, Will and I agreed that experts like old Art — innovator and doer, but no demagogue — are often our favorites.
However rarely elected.
Note: only decades ago, authors acquired expert status, as in “He’s published, you know.” That, too, is changing: a seriously successful crime writer friend called as I tied this up to report an astonishing statistic: in 2014, the number of books released in all formats — just in North America — rose to more than 1.7 million.
