I began tying classic salmon flies about three and a half years ago and not long after learning to apply feathers to hooks I became interested in other aspects of the discipline. One of these was book collecting.

Although I have always had an interest in rare books with their attenedant classic leather and cloth bindings (I often thought I was more interested in the bindings than the texts!) I hardly expected to be drawn into the sometimes feverish pursuit of obscure titles by equally obscure authors.

After buying my first old book from Ken Callahan (Taverner's “Salmon Fishing”), the fever was thoroughly in place and no amount of distraction could break it. The hunt was on!

Once I had gone through the usual Francis Francises, Blackers, Ephemeras, etc. (I don't mean to trivialize these wonderful volumes!), I finally hit "The Wall", Tolfrey's Jones's Guide to Norway. No amount of coaxing, searching, begging or pleading would help; there seemed to be nary a copy to be found. I guess the last straw came when a copy that by all accounts was not in particularly good shape came up at an auction in late 1991 and sold for $3400.00! The die was cast, I would have to do something and soon!

A friend had mentioned that a University in the West owned a copy of Jones's and made it available to anyone interested in studying it through the usual inter-library loan program that most universities maintain. Being a professional photographer I had the equipment to photograph the colored plates and the frontis stone lithographs onto large format Ektachrome transparency film (8-x 10 size). This gave me the basis for beginning a project to literally make my own copy of the book.

Photographing the plates was one thing but translating them into actual, accurate hand-colored plates was something else again!

The first step was to find a way to exactly duplicate the steel engravings of the flies themselves. I soon realized that it would be prohibitively expensive to employ someone with the engraving skills necessary to duplicate them. After much thought, a solution came forth in my mind.

A very fine photo lab in Kansas City (Image Point, Inc.) produced for me a 16 x 20 color print of each of the photographed plates. To each of these I taped a sheet of translucent tracing film and placed the resulting combination onto a light table which thus made it easier for me to trace out the engravings over which the original colorists did their work. Using a very fine brush I was able to duplicate line-for-line and dot-for-dot each engraving. I had each of these renderings reduced back down to their original size onto litho negative film. A local printer was then able to transfer the renderings to paper for subsequent coloring. This method produced the same line thickness found in the original engravings.

Reproducing the text was easier and was accomplished by simply making copies of the pages from the book and having a printer work from these.

The next most difficult step was to reproduce the two stone lithographs at the front of the book. Luckily, I had an. artist friend who specializes in stone lithography and who gave me some instruction on how to draw an image onto stone with litho pencils (similar to China markers). Once the images were complete the stones were etched with a solution of nitric acid and gum arabic.

Two stones were required for each illustration, one for the light background color and one for the picture itself; both printed in register on a special press (owned by my friend who also did the actual printing). The copy for the title page was added later by another printer using standard offset printing techniques.

Once all these details were worked out I began to realize that if I could do one copy, I could do a limited edition of the book to make it available to other collectors. I settled on a total of 50 copies to produce. This meant that I was faced with the task of painting eight plates per book for a total of 400 plates!

This, as one might expect, was a monumental task for one person but I was able to produce consistent results with an "assembly line" technique. I made up two boards to which I then taped 12 plates each to allow me to work on a total of 24 at a time (plus one extra on the side). Thus I could produce a total of 50 plates in about two week's time. For each batch I mixed one color at a time and added it to all 25 plates in succession with subsequent colors added one on top of the other. The colors I used were pigmented, colored drawing inks. I then saved each pre-mixed color in a small jar to use on the next batch, writing down the sequence of colors and how they were used so I could duplicate my work for the second batch of a particular plate.

The front and back covers of the original book had a design that was blind-debossed into them, i.e., no gold leaf was used when the design was pressed into the boards. To duplicate this as well as the design and lettering on the spine (which was done with gold leaf), I again made enlargements of the book and traced out the designs with a technical pen and drafting tools. The finished drawings were reduced back down to original size and converted to copper engravings by a local company.

An important factor that I did not overlook was to be sure and use acid free paper throughout the book for archival permanence. The bindery was also made aware of this need and used the appropriate materials to finish the books. This will insure that "foxing" and other forms of deterioration should not occur many years later.

Even though I will probably not do another reproduction like this I learned a lot about how these beautiful, old 19th-century books were produced. It's hard to believe the number of copies of such sought-after books as Blacker's Art of Fly Making, Ephemera's The Book of the Salmon and Francis Francis's A Book on Angling were made in this painstaking manner. These works will live on to please all who own and appreciate them.