This annotated bibliography is intended to list both notable and not so notable works of English language, non-fiction and fiction related to the sport of fly fishing listed by year published. Although 100% of any book listed is not necessarily devoted to fly fishing, all these titles have significant fly fishing content. Included in this bibliography is a list of species related fly fishing literature.
Annotations may reflect descriptive comments from the book's dust jacket, third party reviews or personal, descriptive and qualitative comments by individuals who have read the book. Some older works have links to online versions in the Internet Archive or Google Books.
Many books on the history of fly fishing for trout credit George Pulman for being the first writer to suggest fishing trout flies as dry flies. Pulman builds up to the introduction of the dry fly by writing very vell about the principle of trout-fly imitation, including size, color and form
— Sylvester Nemes, 2004 [1]
Halford.
One of the subtlest writers on fishing with fly in any form is G.E.M. Skues, the author of Nymph Fishing. His book Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, put an end to the dry-fly purist and brought the angling world back to sanity.
— James Robb, Notable Angling Literature (1945) [2]
This is a classic and I often wonder if Skues knew it would be when he set pen to paper. The book is inspirational in a way that Halford's work never was and grips the reader's attention right from the cover, which in the first edition bears the words: .... The Way of a Trout shows Skues at the height of his powers and it contains the best of his thinking on fishing nymphs and semi-submerged patterns, illustrated by the sort of asides, stories and vast fund of experience that only he could call upon.
— Dr. Andrew Herd [8]
{{cite book}}
: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) One of the most important angling books of the 20th century A Modern Dry Fly Code, Marinaro revolutionized American trout fishing with his experiences on the Pennsylvania spring creeks in the 1940s and 50s. [9] A Modern Dry Fly Code was first published in 1950 and it remains a popular work, having been reprinted at least twice. The Code attracted attention right from the start because there was more in it about terrestrials than there was about mayflies and also because the author focused attention on small imitations to an extent that had never been encouraged before. Marinaro was a brave man for doing it and for some time he stood out as a lone voice in the wilderness; he was challenged, for example, for suggesting that size 14 was the largest hook needed for a dry fly imitation (this was in the days before hooks were available in sizes below 20s). In retrospect, Marinaro probably kicked off a fashion for tiny patterns that went just a little too far before it corrected itself, but his basic point was well made.
— Dr. Andrew Herd [10]
Bergman's Trout is the largest (451 pages) ever devoted to one fish in American publishing history. Many anglers, obviously feeling that there's nothing you can learn from a book that you can't learn better from a fish, consider their libraries complete once they've bought their copies of Bergman's Trout.
— Arnold Gingrich, Joys of Trout, 1973 [12]
Mr. Wright's first book, Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect (E. P. Dutton, 1972) raised the hackles of some reviewers and weekend fishermen. The sportswriter Red Smith wondered in The New York Times whether its author could possibly still be alive. Surely, Mr. Smith wrote, he must have been struck dead for blasphemy, for he had the audacity to suggest that the high priest, Frederic Halford, and such sainted subdeacons as Theodore Gordon, George M. L. LaBranche and Edward Ringwood Hewitt had rocks in their heads when it came to floating a tuft of feather and silk over a trout. The Halford gospel, Mr. Smith noted, taught that the fly should be cast upstream and floated down in an absolutely dead drift. Mr. Wright cast down and across and twitched the fly as he did to suggest to the fish that "here is something alive, edible and defenseless." But Mr. Smith tried the Wright method and then accepted, as he wrote, "what Mr. Wright tells us now – that nothing brings out the essential bully in a trout like a live bug he knows he can whip."
— From Leonard Wright's obituary in The New York Times, 2001 [16]
Brook's book is often seen as the best companion for Schweibert's [Nymphs]; the latter is lacking in detailed instructions on fishing techniques, and the former [this book] contains a catalog of historically known and modern ways of fishing the imitations
— Paul Schullery, American Fly Fishing – A History, 1996. [19]
.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)He [Harry] doesn't have much modern competition in this area [Bass fishing in rivers]. If you want more detail you'll have to wait for new techniques to be developed
— Charles Waterman, 1989. [27]
Lefty codified the saltwater fly-fishing experience in 1974 with the publication of Fly Fishing in Saltwater. This [book] became a virtual bible for an emerging generation of saltwater anglers. It was – and remains – indispenable reading
— Glenn Law, Concise History of Fly Fishing, 1995. [30]