HARDY'S SALMON FLIES: PATTERNS FROM THE FLY TYING DEPARTMENT 1883-1969. By Martin Lanigan-O'Keeffe.

2019 1st edition. Large heavy 4to (225 x 287mm). Ppxxxiv,630. Superb colour photographs and fly plates throughout. Red cloth, spine titled in gilt.

This book contains over 1,000 salmon fly dressings, all They include many which are taken from the fly shop pattern box and notebooks kept by the salmon fly dressers, and some of these may not be recorded elsewhere. There are more than 800 colour illustrations of salmon flies, many of which are the product of the fly shop, some of which are patterns given to Hardy's to copy, and some of which are originals from the hands of Kelson and Pryce-Tannatt, as well as more recent fly dressers including Megan Boyd. As might be expected, given the large number of countries in which Hardy's had agents and customers, there are dressings for England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Iceland, and Norway, and many of the flies are associated with particular rivers, such as the Spey, Tay, Helmsdale, Wye, Usk, Hampshire Avon, and others. There are also some colour illustrations of sample materials intended for particular flies, reproductions of plates from catalogues, and a comprehensive list of all the salmon flies listed in catalogues from 1883 until 1969. "There are many references in the surviving fly shop paperwork to the 'pattern box'. There is no current memory of how this worked in practice, but it will no doubt have been something like the Farlows pattern books, and kept in the charge of the fly shop foreman. If it was still a complete and undisturbed archive it would be priceless, but its contents were dispersed after the closure of the fly shop. Fortunately quite a bit of it has survived, though it is now in different hands, and so it has been possible to put together a partial reconstruction. In some ways this exercise was a bit like trying to make sense of the Farlows pattern books, as over the years there had clearly been some muddling up, as well as some bad handwriting and copying, and pieces of information relating to the same fly had been separated, but there are hundreds of envelopes, pattern flies, handwritten dressings, notes from customers, and even sample materials, relating to over six hundred flies, though some of these are trout flies. Whereas in the case of Farlows there were plenty of flies, but virtually no paperwork, in this case there is plenty of paperwork, but far fewer flies. Chapters include: Introduction; Baden-Powell patterns; Doctors; Dry flies; Eagles; Esmond Drury flies; Flies for Canada and the USA; Other North American flies; Flies for Finland; Fly brooches; Grubs, shrimps, and prawns; Hookless flies; Improved Halcyons; Irish flies in the special catalogue lists; Other Irish flies; Kelson's new salmon flies; W.H. Lawrie's all-fur flies; Low water flies and A.H.E. Wood; Miscellaneous flies; Monoplane flies; Flies for Norway; Quill bodies for salmon flies; The Rover series; Salmon Fishing (Lonsdale Library); The 1912 "Scott" series; Sandeman patterns; Snow flies; Streamers; Sun flies; Tarpon and pike flies; Tube flies; Usk and Wye flies; Wasps. Appendices are: Flies listed in catalogues 1883-1969; Flies recommended for particular rivers 1895-1923.