"Tying legend Jay 'Fishy' Fullum shows you how to make flies that catch fish. Armed with a vice, a hook, a few dabs of glue, and a handful of twisty-ties, Fishy offers invaluable advice, directions, and patterns for making handmade flies with off-the-shelf materials -- all in a friendly, funny, non-technical way. Along with 300 full-color photographs, he explains where to find the materials, make them workable, and turn them into flies that are practically...

John Gierach is a highly trusted and trustable opinion-maker in fly-fishing. People take what he says to the bank. While most of Gierach's writing is essay-style and reflective, here he gets down to the nitty-gritty: how he ties his favorite flies and why he thinks they work so well for him. There is, thus, an instant reader connection: "Gierach's patterns are good enough for me." Few anglers will skip knowing what a master angler and thinker prefers...

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...