What the Trout Said

There are a good many books on fly tying that deal with the question of attracting flies. For some, color is the critical factor; others say it's mathing the hatch precisely. Still others insist on exact dupication of an insect.Proper started out with a very different aproach- perhaps the most scientific of them all. He asked, what arethe specific features that insects key on in feeding? Surprisingly, there are very few, and most of an trout's diet can be simulated with a small number of designs in a few colors. Proper doesn't present endless variations and complex designs. Instead, he lays out a elatively small number of designs, with a rational for each. He doesn't go into detail on how to tie them- it's assumed the reader knows how- and he doesn't get to specific about color either. That's something else the reader can choose to match the circumstances.It's a beautiful, elegant system, and one every experienced fsherman should read.

Forget the huge, illustrated books with thousands of color plates, the long historical tracts, and the mind-numbing quasi-scientific inquiries into trout, their diets and their feeding patterns. In one short book, Proper has distilled all the wisdom of the great fly tiers and added his own insights into the feeding behavior of fish. This is simply the single best book ever written on attracting trout with an artificial fly.