We’re back this week with another quick review and give away of a book – The Fly and the Fish: Angling Instructions and Reminiscences – that we inadvertently tucked back on a shelf several months ago when the review copies arrived but finally read and thoroughly enjoyed.
Kudos to Skyhorse Publishing for bringing back this volume, originally published way back in 1951, written by one of the early legends of fly fishing – John Atherton.
Atherton was a commercial artist (1900-1952) who moved from San Francisco to New York to stake a claim in the burgeoning commercial art world; a fellow artist later convinced him to focus his considerable talents on the realist approach to landscape painting. His notoriety blossomed during the Second World War; he painted a number of revered patriotic works and was published widely including numerous works in The Saturday Evening Post.
Atherton was also a rabid and devoted fly fisher and tier, and channeled his considerable art talents to drawings and paintings of flies and fishing scenes.
His fishing time was focused on the Northeast of course and Vermont in particular. What what we’ve found most interesting was his approach to fly fishing and the natural world about him was that he was able to capture his natural encounters and adventures via the eye of a “romantic realist”.
His insights on fly design – through the eye of an award-winning painter – are priceless, though you’ll need to read the fly sections attentively to dig them out. Atherton’s ability to capture his vision of the natural world in prose is both impressive and inspiring, and I’d love to see more writing today of this depth and vitality as opposed to channeling the most-outrageous-adventure tone that seems all too common.
Note that the book was originally penned in the era of fine cane rods, silk lines, and gut leaders and the prose and structure are much more akin to the great classics than most modern fly fishing tomes you’ll read today. That’s in fact a critical and welcome feature, not a critique.
Not a book necessarily for the novice fisher in your life, but for the more serious fisher and crafter of flies at the vise, this one is an essential for the shelf.
DRAWING CLOSED AS OF MONDAY, 24 JULY. SEE THE GIVE AWAY CORNER IN THE SIDEBAR FOR OUR CURRENT GIVE AWAY. This copy is headed out to Arkansas…
Once again, courtesy of Skyhorse Publishing, we have a brand-spanking-new, never-opened-a-crack, untouched copy to give away. Fire an email here with Fly and the Fish in the subject line and your mailing address; we’ll draw for this one Monday morning, 24 July, at 0900.
Cheers and good reading.
