Primary Resources used for this book
Dame Juliana Berners A Treatise on Fishing With a Hook
Unknown Author The Art of Angling Princeton Univ Press
George Grant Books
The Master Fly Weaver
Montana Trout Flies
Grant's Riffle
George Grant Pamphlets:
Wild Trout
From Boehme to Bailey
The Woven Hair Hackle
River Rat
Short Journeys
Writing Ink
Nymphs
Big Fly Big Fish
Backwoods Flytier
Hard Crossings and Big Strikes
George Grant Audio Cassettes:
George Grant's Life Story
The Don Martinez Life Story
Academic Books and Papers
Hugh Cott Adaptive Coloration in Animals
T.E.Reimchen Evolutionary attributes of headfirst prey manipulation and swallowing in piscivores
Everything else:
G.P.R Pulman The Vade Mechum of Fly Fishing for Trout
Frederick Halford Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice
G.E.M. Skues Minot Tactics of the Chalk Stream
G.E.M. Skues The Way of a Trout with the Fly
Arnold Ginrich (as editor) Theodore Gordon's letters The Complete Fly Fisher
Arnold Ginrich The Fishing in Print
Various authors The Gordon Garland
Ray Bergman Trout
Paul Schulary American Fly Fishing
Terry Lawton Nymph Fishing
Blaine Hallock Early Northwest Fly-Fishing
Jim Quick Fishing the Nymph
Datus Proper What the Trout Said
W.H. Lawrie English Flies
Thomas Sholseth How Fish Work
Gary LaFontaine The Dry Fly New Angles
Chauncey Lively Chauncey Lievely's Fly Box
Thaddeus Norris The American Angler's Book
George MacKenzie LaBranche The Dry Fly and Fast Water
James Leisenring The Art of Fishing with a Wet Fly
William Blades Fishing Flies and Fly Tying
Joe Bates Streamer Fly Tying and Fishing
Preston Jennings A Book of Trout Flies
Ernie Schwiebert Matching the Hatch
Vincent Marinaro A Modern Dry Fly Code
Paul Needham Trout Streams
Doug Swisher Carl Richards Selective Trout
Bob Wyatt What Trout Want
Thanks too for access to flies
Tom Morgan
Mike Wilkerson
Skip Hosfield
and many others
There are some fun pages in the books above. From this list George Grant and Theodore Gordon had the biggest effect on me. The only George Grant book I had for many years was his spiral bound Montana Trout Flies. The writing there is a bit awkward and stiff. I didn't think much of Grant's writing, and perhaps not so much of him too because of it. George was not well educated but he was a smart creative guy who wanted to write and kept at it for a lifetime. By the end of his career he told a pretty good story. George's late-in-life lament about the state of the Big Hole River is eloquent. He was a real Montana guy.
The largest fish I ever took from the Big Hole was a hen brown having a length of 27" inches, girth of thirteen and a weight of seven pounds. it was taken on an Optic Bucktail with a light brown hair wing and an orange wool body.
The riffle from which this fish was taken, just above Glen where the power line crosses the river, was considered to be one of the finest, but now is just a long lifeless silt bottomed backwater formed by an irrigation diversion dam. The river itself is now dying as a trout stream, just like the wild birds and wildlife that have preceded it.
About Gordon I knew virtually nothing until I started reading for this book. Gordon is this Country. Therein lies intelligence creativity, rebelliousness and fun all bundled together, with a girl friend to boot. Gordon is the United States of America at its best.