I think it is important to recognize good work, exceptional work, and to sing its praises-to acknowledge it critically and to suspend all literary and aesthetic judgments briefly, and to simply rejoice in its accomplishment. Therefore, I want to commend to you Mike Radencich, our former editor's, new book, Tying The Classic Salmon Fly: A Modem Approach to Traditional Techniques (Stackpole, 1997), $50, and urge you to buy it. It is a bargain. It might easily cost half again as much and still be a good buy.

The word "advanced" should be somewhere in the title, I think, for this is not a book for beginners, not unless they are more scrupulous and talented than most. In recent years we have seen a number of new books on basic flytying, including some on the salmon fly. All are useful to a varying degree. Many of us started out on Eric Taverner's Salmon Fishing, Volume X of the Lounsdale Library, and we were both encouraged and a bit baffled by it and its shorthand descriptions of the steps in tying. Then came Poul Jorgenson's most helpful book, Salmon Flies (1978). Some of us cut our eyeteeth on it. It was well organized, detailed, and the photographs were of great help in proceeding step-by-step in our work. When we needed still more assistance, we went to the out-of-print, hard to find copies of Hale, Pryce-Tennatt, and eventually bravely tackled that master of fly fishing, salmon-fly tying, and general obfuscation, Mr. George Kelson. The salmon fly was easy, he told us. Perhaps for him it was.

Recently there have been Joe Bates's three excellent books, the posthumous one enhanced by the fine photography ofguess who again-Mike Radencich. With pictures that sharp and pleasing (not to mention large and detailed) there remains no excuse for us being satisfied with flies, including our own, that are anything short of excellent. Not unless we merely want flies to fish with, in which case the patterns can be reduced in some elements and tied fairly slovenly. The fish don't care; only some of us.

In 1995 the stock of basic salmon fly tying books was added to nicely by Ron Alcott, who is so good at taking beginners and instructing them how to vely: tie proficiently, passing is Salmon Fly along many important tricks of the trade. But for the more demanding and already skilled tyer there has been a singular absence of valuable help and critical advise. Our publication, The Salmon Flyer, has helped to fill that void, though it is badly limited in what it can do. It has done a decent job, though limited by severe financial constraints and the inability to pay its writers. Again it is Mike Radencich we are grateful to. A lot of good, state-of-theart information has been collected and disseminated in our newsletter. Now Mike has come along with a book for those of us who care excessively about the salmon fly and the intricacies of its construction. (Lately the word "Atlantic" tends to be dropped from the fly's title, as the fly's popularity has moved steadily toward the Pacific.).

To produce such a book, Mike spent six years tying flies and traveling around the country photographing the best tyers and recording their methods. In the past such secrets have been jealously hoarded, much as one keeps to oneself his best fishing spots. Now the best tyers have come forward and spoken out. They have consented having Mike photograph them at the work they do best.

The book is divided into detailed chapters on the most important elements in fly making and design. Here are Wayne Luallen on tying the married-wing fly, The Baron, which incidentally and perhaps ironically is the same pattern Eric Taverner used in his seminal book, Salmon Fishing, but is more detailed and useful in showing us, step-by-step, how to achieve the desired results; Mark Waslick on tying the fullfeathered winged fly, the Regalia; Bob Veverka on the strip-wing or Dee fly, using as example a no-name fly perhaps of his own design which incorporates all of its basic elements. Additionally there are detailed chapters on the married-winged fly (Marvin Nolte), mounting salmon-fly wings (G. Stackhouse Scotville, Jr.), processing and selecting golden pheasant crest, making tiny heads, and winding finely tapered underbodies (Mike Radencich), dyeing materials and an appendix B which tells you brand names of dyes and where to obtain them (William T. Roubal), making exhibition-quality hooks (Master Hook Maker, Eugene Sunday), of whom Editor Mike says "anybody with a few hand tools and a little patience can master. (Yes, easy for Leonardo, perhaps.) But then Mike adds that it may be really easy because the method consists of rebending existing hooks and eliminates the need to find wire of just the right gauge size, forming barbs, etc., involved in true hook making.

There is a long chapter illustrated by Mike's fine photos on how to mat and frame your flies. The techniques belong to Darwin Atkin. At the back of the book is a gallery of salmon fly-tying art and short biographies of the skilled tyers, each one represented by two or three flies. These include Charles Chute, Dorothy Douglas, the late Syd Glasso, Greg Hunt, Tom Juracek, Mark Kirschner, Mike McCoy, Jophn Olschewsky, Eugene Sunday, John Walker, Bob Warren, John Wildermuth. Mike lists them alphabetically (and so do I) in order to give no illusion of ranking them. All are first-rate in a field whose numbers are growing daily. They are ordinary, eating, breathing human beings, and I am proud to say that some are friends of mine. I believe that their names and examples of their work cannot appear in print too often.

As a bonus, the book includes many pages of photos of original, exhibition flies, many of them tied by Mike. There are also plates he tied of the Blacker and the Trahern flies. They are unsurpassed in quality and will serve as a guide for anybody who wants to attempt them to check his own work against. Additionally, the patterns are given in the book; this is valuable, for they have been difficult to find in the past. The book is not, I repeat, for the beginner, not unless he is a super-fast learner and capable of moving on to advanced work quickly. I am assured by friends that there are many young tyers today who are fast learners. I envy them their dedication and skill. The book is largely for the intermediate and advanced tyer, however. It will help him move on to the next level of competence. Important tyers have generously come forward and allowed Mike to photograph them at their work, revealing many of their secrets and tying tricks. They are invaluable in hurrying along the long learning process. There has never been a book like it in the past and it is unlikely there will be one in the future. To put it another way, all other books on tying the salmon fly seem in comparison to be noble failures, for they come up shy of offering the fine details of what the tyer really needs to know, and often this is the minutiae. Congratulations, Mike. A fine job, handsomely done.

Three books have come my way lately, and while they do not relate to the salmon fly directly, I've found them enjoyable, and you may, too. One is Jack Sampson's fine biography of Lee Wulff. Lee knew many fly fishers in his long life and was noted not only for his ability to catch a lot of fish in difficult and innovative ways but for his friendliness and dedication to the cause of flyfishing. If you look back, so many things we enjoy came about as a direct result of Lee's curiosity and thoughtfulness. It is gratifying then to read in detail about that life.

There is literary biography and then there is literary autobiography. Most fishing books are autobiographical to a distressing degree, their authors permitting themselves long digressions having to do with catching a lot of big fish in remote locations. Charlie Kroll's book, nicely titled Pools of Memory, does this, too, but redeems itself with the author's sustained interest in where his quest takes him and comprises a kind of flyfishing history than spans the midTwentieth Century around the world. From the standpoint of Atlantic salmon, Charlie goes to the Big Laxa and catches some nice fish; there is a picture of him reclining in a bleak landscape, his requisite cane (for he badly injured himself in a car accident and never recovered to the point of being able to fish and wade without it) alongside, dressed in full ancestral Scottish gear, with a pair of twenty-pound salmon also reclining on the treeless tundra. It is not clear from the text whether Charlie caught both of them or only one, but the picture is unforgettable. So is much else in the book, including his fishing the Killey Water in Scotland and catching sea trout and a ten-pound salmon. He boldly poached the River Dee, as he was sure his ancestors did, around a bend, out of sight, but the fish he touched jumped free. I envy him this and the many other places he was determined to fish and did.

A third book which recalls a life as a flyfisher is Van Egan's Streamside Reflections. He was a friend of Roderick Haig-Brown, who was his role model, and Valerie edited the book for him. It traces his life and his fishing from upstate Wisconsin to Vancouver, Island, British Columbia, and like Kroll's book sadly reports a progressive decline in the health of so many fish stocks, over the years. Kroll does this by attaching an update addendum to his many short chapters; Egan weaves it through out his pleasant and very readable book, in particular tracing the demise of the famed Campbell river salmon and summer steelhead, and in the instance of the latter its partial recovery, but only through a broodstock-recovery hatchery program. Perhaps it is because I am growing older, too, that I enjoy this type of book and the kind of life it illustrates. Frank Amato published all three and deserves special thanks for bringing the last two to light. If potentially large sales were the only consideration, they wouldn't have been printed. But the books have redeeming literary value and we all would be poorer without them, for books like these enrich our lives, when the popular how-to-do it books usually do not.

There are a number of classic patterns that call for bustard in the wing. In T.E. Pryce-Tannatt's book, How to Dress Salmon Flies, there are a copious number of patterns that call for florican and bustard in the wing. In salmon fly patterns, whenever bustard is called for in the wing the author is most likely referring to "Speckled" bustard, of which most often Kori bustard is used.

Suitable substitutes for speckled bustard include; light mottled turkey tail, ocellated turkey tail, and the "wrong" side of a peacock wing secondary.