The Art of Tying the Bass Fly 2nd Edition

(*NOTE: The Art of Tying the Bass Fly 2nd Edition has recently
gone out of print. Second-hand copies may be available on
Amazon or at second-hand book stores.)

The standard instructional text for how to tie flies for bass and panfish...

For 15 years the original version of The Art of Tying the Bass Fly served as the standard text for instruction on how to tie flies for largemouth and smallmouth bass and pan fishes.

Learn to spin, stack, and compress deer hair with dazzling results...

It included lots of clear and concise instruction and color photographs that taught you to spin deer hair, stack various colors of it for amazing results, compress it efficiently, shape compressed hair with scissors and razor blade, make snag guards of all kinds, make hackle tails and rubber-strand legs and mount plastic eyes and much more.

Now here's the new, up-to-date version of this popular book...

When Skip set out to update the book, he was surprised to find that many of its original fly patterns were still as popular and trusted as ever. Nevertheless, some fly patterns had given way to newer and more effective designs, and some other major changes had occurred in the world of bass-fly tying and design.

So Skip simply rewrote the original book, end to end, resulting in The Art of Tying the Bass Fly 2nd Edition. He retook some critical photos too, and added some new flies in both the tying section and the collection of additional patterns at the end of the book.

...teaching you to tie the best flies out there with the latest techniques!

Though The Art of Tying the Bass Fly held up remarkably well over the past decade and a half, The Art of Tying the Bass Fly 2nd Edition rides the current leading edge of the tier's art. And in general, it's even better than the original.

Here are some sample pages from the book...

Top left: flies of a specific type—such as diving flies or sinking flies—are grouped, and introduced with an explanation of their use and design.

Introductory pages also rank the tying difficulty of each fly on a scale of 1 to 5.


Top right: vivid color photographs and concise instruction make the tying of each fly easy to follow. Special sections explore spinning hair and stacking various colors of hair for remarkable effects.

Top left: materials used in tying bass flies—hairs, hackles, rubber-strand, mono for snag guards, and the rest—are shown in big color photos and explored in detail as they apply to bass-fly tying.

Materials particularly important to the bass-fly tier are given the royal treatment—selecting hair for spinning, choosing among the many kinds of thread, finding the right monofilament for making snag guards...


Top right: at the end of the book is a collection of 35 additional flies for largemouth and smallmouth bass and bluegill and other pan fishes.

In The Art of Tying the Bass Fly 2nd Edition, the dressings are through—all the materials and even some substitutes, tying instructions where needed, details on when and where and how to fish the flies, variations, and a color photo of each fly.