The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

And to continue plundering Dickens, the current state of fly fishing “was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .  it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . . ”
by Ted Leeson

Among its manifold infirmities, the human memory inclines to the categorical and absolute, preferring broad brushstrokes to nuance and detail.

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Mister Currier & Mister Ives & Mister Tate

 “Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures” of, among other interesting subjects, Victorian sportfishing.
by Brooke Chilvers 

If you were alive before Joe DiMaggio first laid eyes on Marilyn Monroe, chances are your grandparents grew up with a Currier & Ives lithograph in the house. For 50 years (1857 to 1907) the “Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures”—a firm built by the tall, politically liberal, and melancholy Nathaniel Currier and the short, plump, and jovial James Merritt Ives—averaged three new titles every week, totaling some 7,500 individual works and perhaps a million prints.

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In Defense of "The Movie"

Why blaming Brad Pitt for crowded trout streams is just plain wrong.
by Dennis King

I am haunted by movies. For 20 years, when I was a full-time film critic at the daily newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, movies were my passionate vocation. And since fly fishing and reading were my equally passionate avocations, it came by grace that one particular movie, drawn from a stately novella sacred to trout fishers all, should stand out among the thousands I waded through and reviewed.

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Hidden Jewels

A photographic journal.
by Denver Bryan & Billy De Jong

They’re fly fishing’s little jewels, sometimes secreted in the back of beyond, sometimes hidden in plain sight. Small streams. Always beckoning, whatever the setting.

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Deep in the Amazon

A photographic journal.
by R. Valentine Atkinson

We all know about peacock bass even if we’ve never caught one. The world’s most beautiful and
belligerent freshwater gamefish. Smashers of plugs. Destroyers of tackle. Contenders atop the
food chain with caimans and crocodiles and who knows what else in the dark and murky waters
of the world’s largest river flowing through the world’s largest rainforest.

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