Used hardcover in very good to excellent condition.
FAVORITE FLIES AND THEIR HISTORIES
Mary Orvis Marbury
"The most famous but one female angling author..."
That was how the Fishing Gazelle headlined Mary Orvis Marbury's obituary when she died in 1914. As much as anything said or written about her in her lifetime, it signaled the place she occupied in sportfishing, for the “most famous” female author would be none other than the mysterious Dame Juliana Berners, who reputedly produced, in 1492, the first book on fishing. Since this beginning, women have played a small—in numbers—but important role in fly-fishing, and Mary Orvis likely ushered modern womanhood into not only the sport but also the business behind the sport.
Mary was the first (of four—the others wereboys) child of Charles F. Orvis and Laura Walker Orvis, of Manchester, Vermont. She was born in 1856, the year that marked the founding of The Orvis Company, which has survived and prospered mightily in Manchester to the present day. This is due in part to daughter Mary's direct efforts as a fly tier, businesswoman, author and editor. Mary wed a John Marbury in 1877, but the marriage didn't "take"; they separated and their only child died young.
Charles Orvis was one of those practical Yankee tinkerer-businessmen who helped make the New England reputation for mechanical innovation combined with high standards of quality. He invented the modern lightweight fly reel, and while he didn't come up with any similar breakthroughs in fly rods he and his company did much to make first-class rods widely available. In the Victorian Era fly-fishing became popular as a "refined" way to fish, and the modern merchandising triangle of manufacturer, publisher and consumer was established. It functioned just as it does today—small companies make tackle, the sporting press writes about it, and anglers buy it. Curiously, then—as now also—fishing flies were in short supply; or at least the sort of flies that were first, effective on trout and other gamefish, and second, recognized as such by anglers in general. Exotic materials for tying flies—ranging from polar bear hair to macaw plumes—were available, and in a great flurry of activity every region of America was busy developing its own fly patterns and its own names for flies that anglers in another watershed might know as something entirely different. Into the breach stepped Mary Orvis. To assure her dad of a reliable source of flies tied to consistent standards, in 1876 she took over the company's commercial fly production. She had earlier shown considerable interest in fly-tying, so much that Charles, nobody's fool, had hired an expert "fly dresser” to come to Vermont from New York City to teach her all he knew. Mary's half-dozen tiers, all young women, worked upstairs in a white clapboard building on Union Street that still belongs to Orvis. At the time there were larger fly factories in America, but from this small one would come not only very fine flies but also the beginnings of the standardization that brought order to fly-pattern chaos.
This book, the first of many to be published about flies in America, began to take shape around 1890. Orvis wrote to anglers around the country (“in the localities affording the finest fishing”) soliciting information on their favorite flies and how they were to be made and used. The result was this book, published in 1892. It was so well received that, according to Schullery & Hogan's The Orvis Story, it went through at least nine printings by 1896—a fishing best-seller even by today's standards. Until this edition, Favorite Flies had been reprinted only once since then, in 1955, by the Charles T. Branford Company, Boston.
Mary was not truly the author of this book; think of her instead as the compiler and editor, a formidable task itself. Her inquiries resulted in publishable responses from more than two hundred fly fishermen in thirty-eight states, detailing almost three hundred flies. At last there was a definitive encyclopedia of American (as opposed to British) patterns, accompanied by fascinating and expert-advice on their use. Much of it sounds startlingly current.