THE BLACKER COMPENDIUM: AN INTERPRETATION OF EVERY SALMON FLY AS DESCRIBED BY WILLIAM BLACKER HIMSELF, IN HIS BOOK OF 1855, THE ART OF FLY MAKING. By Bob Frandsen.

2011 1st edition. Large 4to paperback (217 x 279mm). Pp158. Colour plates of flies by Lorraine Frandsen, colour photographs and illustrations.

Bob Frandsen is a noted Australian fly tyer who has long been intrigued and frustrated by the often sketchy descriptions of fly patterns in Blacker's Art of Fly Making. Not a few of these patterns were published without an illustration. Blacker was quite ill at the time he wrote the book, and it is likely that a certain amount of it consists of poorly digested notes made during his extensive fly fishing trips around the British Isles. In this work, Bob Frandsen has taken Blacker's salmon flies (not the trout flies) scrutinising them closely, and comparing Blacker's illustrations with his recipes as well as with other contemporary descriptions of similar patterns. "By studying the general mix of all of his patterns, I've determined what I think Mr Blacker would have done. As a result, you will find I add little items [to individual patterns] here and there all the way through, while I also try to keep the patterns as they would have looked in the mid-nineteenth century, and not tissy them up to suit modern tastes. Apart from the illustrated patterns, which I have taken extra care to match, the others have been dressed for fishing." A nineteen-page section gives step by step photographs and instructions on methods necessary to reproduce Blacker's flies, and as commentary on the unclear instructional passages in The Art of Fly Making. A valuable and accessible addition to the literature of salmon fly tying.