I hope this is a comment that might help others. I have many books on fly tying, and a certain subset is not on tying flies, but instead on techniques, or solving tying problems. When I was a beginning tier, I found these books frustrating because I always wanted full instructions on the fly being used to talk about the problem or technique. The point was great, but the details on the fly was missing. The author did this to focus the book on technique, not on flies.

Now, I find these books wonderful resources with gems of ideas as I re-read them. Sometimes one might feel a book is not helpful, when it really is, because they are not ready to use it yet. One of best I think is "Tying Better Flies" by Art Scheck, and the worst is "The Benchside Reference Guide". I'm sure many disagree, but this is a small sample of the insanity of this book:

The section on tying prince nymph wings references another section on tying feather tip tent wings, not exactly the equivilent. Given 444 pages, you think they could have made room for the wings of the most highly sold fly ever.

I did finally learn how to tie good prince nymph wings, but not from the benchside reference.



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- rriver