Fly tying consists mostly of doing mundane things: mount thread, wrap hackle. Nevertheless, it has its “Aha!” moments — moments of sudden insight, when something just clicks and what was a puzzle becomes clear or what was difficult becomes easy. For some tyers, moments of illumination that throw light on some aspect of this simple, yet often difficult practice are enough. We now do differently what we used to do before, and the result is that we tie better flies. For others — certainly, one hopes, for those prompted to share their insights in print — after the moment of illumination comes reflection on what they have learned, its significance, and how it can benefit other tyers.
These moments of illumination and reflection are what I look for when I’m reviewing books, chiefly fly-tying books, for California Fly Fisher. Even in the relatively limited domain of tying books, such moments can appear in a variety of ways. In addition to looking for creative thinking about approaches to fly tying, which any fly-tying book that has merited publication ought to exhibit at least to some degree, I also am alert to intelligent and useful accounts of the origins and development of the craft, because as is so often remarked, a lot of innovations in fly tying are reinventions of older innovations, and there are only so many ways to bind stuff to a hook. That also means that anyone who can teach me useful techniques and skills gets my attention. Finally, there are a few books in which the issues illuminated occur at the “meta” level of the “philosophy” of fly design. “Philosophy” gets scare quotes, because this ain’t phenomenology or logical positivism, but just an effort to claim what’s fundamental in the construction of an artificial imitation of an insect or other food item that will, you know, catch a fish.
Among the tying books that best reflect illuminating “Aha!” moments, one of the standouts is the late Jim Cramer’s Become a Thinking Fly Tier: The Way to Rapid Improvement (No Nonsense Fly Fishing Guidebooks, 2013). Cramer, an engineer who used to work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t just tell you to think like a creative fly tyer, he explains how to go about doing it and then exemplifies the results with a series of stunning ideas about how to tie flies.
Another tying book remarkable for illuminating its topic is Allen McGee’s Fly-Fishing Soft-Hackles: Nymphs, Emergers, and Dry Flies (Stackpole Books, 2017). Although soft hackles were popularized for modern American anglers by Sylvester Nemes in a series of books starting in the mid-1970s, the basic fly design is as old as fly tying itself — it’s an obvious way to mate a hook and a feather to imitate a bug underwater — and tying and fishing soft hackles has a long history in the British Isles. Such a tradition can induce veneration to the point that it stifles creative thought. Not so for McGee. The subtitle says it all: beginning with the basic soft-hackle design and techniques, he’s worked up an array of patterns that even includes dry flies and spinners. An articulated extended-body soft hackle is just one result of this process. McGee is an innovative fly-tying thinker with creative insights into how to use fur and feathers to catch fish.
So is Mike Mercer, as many Californians have known for a long time, as is Colorado’s Scott Sanchez. The West has a long history of brilliant improvisation in fly tying, and as I put it in a review of Creative Fly Tying, by Mercer (Wild River Press, 2005) and A New Generation of Trout Flies: From Midges to Mammals for Rocky Mountain Trout, by Sanchez (Wild River Press, 2005), Mercer and Sanchez were “the Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie” of their generation of fly tyers. In these books, both approached fly tying as an intelligent, problem-solving enterprise, and because both had access to full-service, trout-oriented fly shops, they could employ the latest innovations in materials in the effort to conceive more effective flies. Since publication, materials have continued to evolve, and the patterns Mercer and Sanchez developed suggest ways in which these can be employed to carry their smart improvisations forward.
But if we’re considering tyers in the relatively recent past whose works are the product of exceptional insight and thought, we can’t leave out Gary LaFontaine. Prior to his path-breaking Caddisflies (Lyons and Burford, 1981), caddisflies had only recently begun to be treated as a major hatch of interest to fly fishers, thanks to books such as Leonard Wright’s Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect (E. P. Dutton, 1972) and Larry Solomon and Eric Leiser’s The Caddis and the Angler (Stackpole Books, 1977). In a monumental work of both entomological research and fly-tying innovation, LaFontaine produced both a systematic survey of caddis species in the United States and an innovative system of patterns to imitate them in all of their life stages. And not content with the research in scientific journals, LaFontaine donned scuba gear and went to see for himself how the bugs and the fish and the flies behave, as Ralph Cutter also has done since then. What LaFontaine learned informs the patterns in The Dry Fly: New Angles (Greycliff, 1990) and Trout Flies: Proven Patterns (Greycliff, 1993), tying books featuring many patterns that are at once goofy in appearance and founded on rigorous observation, substantiated by angling success. The cliché is that people like LaFontaine “think outside the box.” Gary LaFontaine didn’t see a box — he just looked and saw what’s there.
Most of us, though, have to muddle through with what we learn from books ideally, books with the kinds of insight I’ve been discussing. Even if we’re trying to be thinking fly tyers seeking our own “Aha!” moments and solving contemporary angling and tying problems, knowing what was done in the past not only forecloses the possibility of reinventing the Quill Gordon, but supplies techniques and ideas with which to move forward, even though looking back to the past. In an old book I picked up at a sale, Poul Jorgensen’s Modern Fly Dressings for the Practical Angler (Winchester Press, 1977), I discovered and fell in love with a technique for making extended mayfly bodies with split tails simply by stroking down the body of something like a mallard breast feather, snipping out all but two barbs of the tip to form a V, and treating the bottom part with cement to hold it together. But then I found out that Jorgensen had learned the technique from the legendary Harry Darbee, who discusses it in the book he published “with” Mac Francis, Catskill Flytier: My Life, Times, and Techniques ( J. B. Lippincott, 1977), where he also will tell you how to skin a chicken for its cape. And then, on the Internet, I found the technique being used in a new way by the innovative Swedish tyer, Ulf Hagström.
That’s how moments of illumination can shine from the past into the present and the future, and that’s why books dealing with past f ly-tying achievements are of more than historical interest they’re resources that illuminate the practice today. Mike Valla’s Tying Catskill Dry Flies (Headwater Books, 2009) is the definitive modern work on that subject, and Valla’s The Founding Flies: 43 American Masters, Their Patterns and Influences, covers pretty much the entire history of American fly tying, from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, by focusing on those select historical figures. But because during that long time span fly fishing was developing largely on the East Coast and then in the Midwest, and because Valla himself is an East Coast guy who learned tying from the also legendary Walt and Winnie Dette, his account is both limited to those few f igures and somewhat slanted away from the Left Coast. Californian Terry Hellekson’s Fish Flies: An Encyclopedia of the Fly Tier’s Art, second edition (Gibbs Smith, 2005) is indeed an encyclopedic listing of myriad patterns and variations by a multitude of tyers, known and unknown, including fly recipes, and it pays attention to West Coast tyers, often supplying mini essays on who created what, one of the most difficult historical issues to settle. It’s a useful reference tool.
But fly tyers need reference works for more than just the historical background of the craft. Whether beginner, intermediate, or expert tyer, all at some point need some way to learn or remember techniques, methods, and approaches to particular tying needs and problems. Today, Internet videos supply some of this kind of information, but time has proven that books have their place. Fly tying, like fly casting, may still be best learned and taught via in-person instruction, but because physical books are small and portable resources that fit both the fly-tying desk and the ethos of an enterprise that has a long history, they always will be valued.
Virtually all tying books begin with some perfunctory instructions on materials and techniques, but as anyone who has tried to describe a seemingly simple action in prose will know, writing lucid how-to instructions for tying techniques and procedures is not easy to do. The best examples are books that clearly illuminate this important topic.
For beginners, I’ve contended that the best-thought-out introduction to fly tying is Ted Leeson and Jim Schollmeyer’s Benchside Introduction to Fly Tying (Frank Amato, 2006), a companion for newbies to their massive Fly Tiers Benchside Reference (Frank Amato, 1998). The book is spiral bound, and between the covers, the pages are split horizontally, with one part covering basic techniques and the other representative patterns tied using those techniques. Since most patterns require multiple techniques, the format allows the beginning tyer working on a particular fly to flip around the book to find how to tie each step, as needed — a really neat idea.
A more conventional approach to an introductory tying book, one that also takes the tyer from the bench to the water to fish what’s been created, is Dave Hughes’s Essential Trout Flies, Second Edition: 50 Indispensable Patterns with Stepby-Step Instructions for 300 Most Useful Variations (Stackpole, 2017). Simply put, Dave Hughes writes the clearest, simplest tying instructions available, and even experienced tyers will be reminded of techniques that they have forgotten or learn things they never knew.
Because, as William F. Blades once said, “Fly tying is a school from which we never graduate,” experienced tyers look for books that will help them advance their skills. To that end, it’s hard to beat Oliver Edwards’s Flytyers Masterclass: A Step-by-Step Guide to 20 Essential Patterns for the Flyfisher (Stroger, 1995). Contrary to the subtitle, it’s not the patterns themselves, but the techniques that Edwards thought out for tying them, illustrated by his own lucid drawings, that make the book a valuable resource. And while I’d discourage anyone from becoming a production fly tyer who’s not willing to take a vow of poverty (vows of chastity and obedience are unlikely among fly tyers), A. K. Best’s Production Fly Tying, Third Edition (Stackpole, 2015) is full of ideas that will make even the occasional twiddler with fur and feathers a better tyer. As you might expect from someone who has tied as many as 3,000 dozen flies in one year, Best has experienced major “Aha!” moments, has thought long and hard about very particular aspects of tying technique, materials, and fly design, and has strong opinions about all of them. As I wrote in reviewing the book, “It’s the reasoning behind Best’s frequently strong and strongly expressed opinions that’s most helpful in deciding whether you find his methods palm-to-the-forehead, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that brilliant, or just useful, or not really for you. However, they are always interesting.”
The real domain of strong opinions and disagreements in fly tying occurs at the “meta” level of the philosophy of fly design, and there are tying books that have defined that domain. Fly tyers can be obsessive about minute details (A. K. Best is), and what feeds that obsession, in many cases, is the supposed imperative to match the hatch by tying close imitations of the natural bugs in order to entice “selective trout,” to use the term employed by Doug Swisher and Carl Richards in Selective Trout: A Dramatically New and Scientific Approach to Trout Fishing on Eastern and Western Rivers (Lyons and Burford, 1971).
I say “supposed imperative,” because although it may seem inconceivable today, for much of fly-tying history, the scrupulous matching of hatching insects was not much of a consideration, and most classic trout flies don’t look much like any particular actual insect — many don’t resemble any identifiable insect at all. For anglers of an earlier generation, the origin of the imperative to match the hatch was Ernest Schwiebert’s Matching the Hatch: A Practical Guide to Imitation of Insects Found on Eastern and Western Trout Waters (Macmillan, 1962), a work he followed up with his massive and massively detailed Nymphs: A Complete Guide to Naturals and Imitations (Winchester Press, 1973). Al Caucci and Bob Nastasi’s Hatches: A Complete Guide to Fishing the Hatches of North American Trout Streams (Comparahatch, 1975), also promoted matching the hatch. Following that imperative while fishing the notoriously reticent trout of the Henrys Fork in Idaho, René Harrop has said that at the height of the season, he carries as many as eighteen fully stocked fly boxes covering the variations in all the hatches he will encounter.
But that design philosophy spawned disagreement, most notably articulated by Datus Proper in What the Trout Said: About the Design of Trout Flies and Other Mysteries (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). In the introduction to the second edition (Lyons and Burford, 1989), he declared, “Mixtures of science and art have produced ten thousand flies we don’t need.” Proper agreed that imitating the size, shape, and color of the bugs that fish are eating is important, but what he stressed is what he called “behavior.” Reductively put, in contesting the match-the-hatch emphasis on the literal imitation of the bug itself, Proper and others following him have argued that what matters (or what matters when the bug looks more or less right to the fish and the fly fisher) is presentation avoiding unnatural behavior and presenting the fly in the same way that the natural behaves.
That’s more of a both/and position than an either/or opposition, though, and as tends to happen, some fly fishers and tyers have taken the difference in stress to its logical conclusion: that hatch matching is irrelevant in fly design and that all a properly presented fly needs to do is contain a few elements that will induce a fish to try to eat it. That’s the argument of Bob Wyatt’s What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths (Stackpole, 2013). Instead of attempting to replicate salient physical elements of the natural insect, Wyatt and those who find him persuasive, such as Morgan Lyle in Simple Flies: 52 Easy-to-Tie Patterns that Catch Fish (Headwater Books, 2015), actually advocate “removing as many details as possible in the interest of creating a sort of Rorschach test for evoking piscine desires,” as I put it in reviewing Lyle’s book. They simplify flies — although not necessarily the number of fly patterns, as Lyle’s subtitle reveals. Some will find that appealing, and some will ask “Where’s the fun in that?”
And that’s where illumination of the topic of fly design carries across to the reader’s own mind — as it does, in different ways, in all these books and the various topics they address. Where you place yourself on the imitation/presentation spectrum requires reflection, but in many different ways, good books on approaches to the craft of tying, its history, and its techniques all should do the same: carry forward both how you think about lashing fur and feathers and other materials to hooks and how you do it. That’s what any good book does — it moves the search for illumination forward from others through you.
