Forgotten Flies.

Published in 1999 by Complete Sportsman of Millis, Massachusetts, Forgotten Flies is Paul Schmookler and Ingrid V. Sils's monumental study of the artificial fly at the highest reaches of its craft and one of the most lavishly produced angling books of the modern era. Running to more than four hundred pages in a large folio format, the volume gathers the most elaborate and beautiful patterns ever tied for salmon and trout, drawn from the traditions of Britain, Ireland, the Continent, and North America across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and presented in hundreds of full-color photographs of an exceptional standard rarely equaled in the literature of the sport. Featuring hundreds of undiscovered fly designs from expert craftsmen including John Raymond Bergman, Charles DeFeo, Preston J. Jennings, Mary Orvis Marbury, and Carrie Gertrude Stevens, the book is a dynamic and inspiring collection of work drawn from a long-forgotten tradition, and many of the patterns appear for the first time in its pages, with faithful reproductions based on the drawings and unpublished notes of their creators. Schmookler and Sils trace the history of the classic salmon fly and its close relations through the work of these tiers and their British counterparts, among them George Kelson, T. E. Pryce-Tannatt, and Major John Popkin Traherne, restoring to the record patterns long since fallen out of everyday use and photographing exhibition-quality dressings by contemporary masters of the craft. The book is at once a work of scholarship, a photographic monograph, and an act of preservation, and it was issued in a comparatively small edition that included a signed and numbered deluxe issue much sought after by collectors. In the years since its publication Forgotten Flies has come to be regarded as the standard reference in its field and one of the definitive books on the artistry of fly tying.