TE Pritt was the angling editor of The Yorkshire Post when he published Yorkshire Trout Flies in 1885. Only 200 copies of the book were printed. This kindle edition presents Pritt's original text and fly-tying patterns, along with watercolour prints. It provides fly patterns for each month through the season, how to fish them and when.
The flies are simple to tie - sparsely-dubbed bodies with only a hackle (no wings) - and provide the angler with a ready match for every hatch. When wary trout are ignoring everything offered to them, the scaled-down simplicity of a North Country Spider might be just the thing to draw a reaction.
This edition of Yorkshire Trout Flies is not a blurry collection of unreadable PDF files (all too common in republished out-of-print books). The text has been reformatted using modern fonts so that it is as easy to read as any other Kindle book and then reorganised so that the images of the flies sit alongside their recipes, making it much more user-friendly. The great man would surely approve.
And to anyone who thinks these patterns only work in Yorkshire, perhaps the last word should be left to the man himself:
"It only remains to be said that the illustrations on the following plates have been very carefully copied from flies dressed by various Yorkshire makers. The originals, or others like them, have done service on half the rivers and lakes of England and Scotland, and have never failed to give a satisfactory account of themselves, despite the lugubrious warnings of local hands that “they were no use thereâ€. You will be told this probably on every new river visited; yet may you safely fish Yorkshire flies and laugh to scorn the dismal prophecies of anglers who believe that the trout in their own river differ in their choice of flies from those of any other river in the universe."
And to anyone wondering if these old-school flies still work today, get Year of the Spider to see how Pritt's flies performed on the River Tees in the North-East of England over the summer of 2013 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00GKX52K4