Fly-Tying

No book has taught—or retaught—more serious fly tiers the basic skills of fly tying than Helen Shaw’s Fly-Tying. Shaw’s simple and logical prose throughout and more than 250 life-size tying sequences make the various processes easy to understand, follow, and apply.

Readers of Fly-Tying will learn every skill necessary to tie flies using many different materials, including:

Thread
Tinsel
Floss
Wool
Dubbing
Hair
Quill
Feathers

Introductory chapters teach aspiring fly tiers about the tools of the trade, while a chapter titled “The Finished Fly” explains how to use what they have created. Learning the various techniques one-by-one throughout the text will help fly tiers of all backgrounds and levels of expertise to tie hundreds of different patterns.

With a new color photo insert, foreword by David Klausmeyer, and note from Nick Lyons, a whole new generation of tiers will benefit from the reintroduction of this authoritative book more than fifty years after its original publication in 1963.

Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for fishermen. Our books for anglers include titles that focus on fly fishing, bait fishing, fly-casting, spin casting, deep sea fishing, and surf fishing. Our books offer both practical advice on tackle, techniques, knots, and more, as well as lyrical prose on fishing for bass, trout, salmon, crappie, baitfish, catfish, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Helen Shaw began tying flies when she was in high school. By the age of twenty, she had already established her own fly-tying business. She authored numerous articles and books on fly tying, including Flies for Fish and Fishermen (1989), and was a member of the International Women Fly Fishers and National Fishing Lure Collector’s Club. She passed away in 2007 in Red Rock, New York.

“A virtuoso performance in every respect!” —Lee Wulff