A NEW PRIMER OF FLYFISHING

Understanding flyfishing means understanding how to untangle knots and working through the best plan of attack for getting a fly out of a tree. As editor Jason Rolfe demonstrates deep in the Alaskan backcountry, sometimes you just gotta pull on it and hope the 5x holds.

In 1964, Roderick Haig-Brown published A Primer of Fly-Fishing, a book that Nick Lyons, in his introduction to the 1982 edition, called “a standard for anyone who would understand how best to present in word what eventually must be learned by hand and eye.” It’s a quaint idea nowadays, given the proliferation of the visual into every aspect of our lives. But the book also offers a rejoinder to the accumulation of instructional and celebratory dreck served up by the algorithm these days.

By outward appearance the book is a plain one, scantily—if elegantly—illustrated over the course of 18 chapters with such simple titles as “Rods and Reels,” “Fishing Lakes,” “Dry-Fly Fishing” and—titillatingly—“Dry-Fly Fishing—New Techniques.” Anyone familiar with the work of Haig-Brown (who died in 1976) knows that behind those deceptively modest designations lie rich tableaux. Nonetheless, he is insistent on flyfishing’s basic simplicity, calling the seven or so pages he devotes to rods and reels a lengthy and serious treatment. Imagine trying to fit a discussion of the effluence of those tools into seven pages today—you’d barely have space to get through all the 3-weights on offer, let alone the two-handers, bass rods, switch rods and surf rods that are the descendants of Haig-Brown’s mid-century tackle.

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