I suppose this fits under Fly Tying as much as any other topic on the board.

I'm a regular patron of my local library system and have used them for many fly tying, fly fishing and rod building books. I usually sort by publication date and focus on newer publications because of the latest techniques, tools, materials and especially high resolution color photos. However I ordered a book recently in the on-line catalog that I didn't noticed the date when I ordered it The book was titled: Fly Tying & Fly Fishing for Bass and Panfish By Tom Nixon.

When I picked it up It was quite obvious it was an older book, (c) 1968, but I perused it anyway. There were few pictures (black and white) and many sketches and drawings. What caught my eye in one of the photos was, what looked like hackle pliers, or more like what i call reverse tweezers. The same clamping principle as hackle pliers. Anyway reading the caption under the photo, I stopped, kind of shocked. It said something like "...use a surgeons artery clamp for hackle pliers...".
Ok so the design it's anything new.Many of you probably have tweezers or clamps like this already. I started searching the web for surgeons artery clamps and found this.

http://www.braceface.com/medical/Sur...%20forceps.JPG

But the real kicker is that this picture which looks exactly like what was in the book, even though THIS clamp dates to the Civil War.

Artery clamp, or Tissue forceps, from what the website says, this picture is Civil War era. But this is identical to the picture in Nixon?s book which he describes as a Surgeons artery clamp.

I found the Civil War era reference very intriguing.