John Roberts -- Collins Illustrated Dictionary of Trout Flies

Over the next week or so, I'm going to be posting my thoughts on a handful of fly tying books. Here's the first, on one that I bought out of a bargain book newspaper catalog I used to get until maybe 2000 or so:

Collins Illustrated Dictionary of Trout Flies by John Roberts

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is one I just don't connect with. It's a great collection of recipes, with maybe 1000 patterns, and includes work by some great tiers. Just in the "W" section we get Whitlock, Wotton, and Wulff (and then throw in LaFontaine, Ruane, etc.).

So it's a great compendium, but that's it. There's not much instruction here, or instruction on how to fish the patterns. So I'm sort of criticizing it for being something it didn't mean to be, I admit.

It's also a bit British for my purposes, whether it's the certain terminology or certain patterns that just seem culturally off to me.

One oddity about using the book (though this is wise in terms of price and) is that the pictures of patterns are separate from the recipes, with a set of full-color plates in the middle of the book. It takes some flipping to see exactly what you're looking at and how to make it. But this is a reference volume, not an instructional manual. It's just not one that really does it for me.

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