Edmonds & Lee

[Variant]

I have Courtney Williams book and for me it is an essential reference. I don’t know of any list of Aldam’s fly (flee) recipes but Halford gives one for Indian Yellow. The description for the silk is the color of natural Russia Leather. Some fly wallets were made of it. There is a lot of interesting information surrounding the whole subject.


https://www.purdey.com/the-russia-leather

https://www.hermes.com/us/en/story/2503 ... a-leather/

https://colourlex.com/project/indian-yellow/

Thanks Bill,
I fish the Indian Yellow pattern quite a bit, and I could never nail down the silk color.The posts that you put up really helps.
Lou

[wsbailey]

Lou,

This might the best description to be found short of having Aldam’s book:

https://archive.org/details/flyfishento ... 7/mode/2up

[Greenwell]

Actually, the link is to Alfred Ronald's book, "The Fly Fisher's Entomology" and not W.H. Aldam's "Quaint Treatise."

Aldam wanted to chronicle the fly patterns found in an 18th century manuscript and provide actual specimens of both the flies and materials to dress them. His book described all 26 of the patterns in the MS and reproduced 16 of them, as well as 5 of his own, and 2 Ogdan mayflies (which are considered to be some of the earliest purpose dressed dry flies extant), in specimen mounts with the materials to dress them. (The mayflies do not have the materials for them in the mounts.)

The Aldam patterns are available in J.N. Watson's "Angling with the Fly," W.H. Lawrie's "A Reference Book of English Trout Flies." and Andrew Herd's "Trout Fly Patterns- 1496 - 1916"

[wsbailey]

I didn’t know of a reference to the flies of Aldam so Ronalds was the best I could do. The problem I have is figuring out the colors.

[Greenwell]

Outside of the color descriptions in his printed patterns, Ronalds is unreliable as to color. The plates in the book were hand colored and through it's many editions from 1836 - 1913 the colors changed a fair amount. It is said that Ronalds himself colored the first 4 editions of the book. I have the 1st and 4th editions and have seen many of the others, and there is a great deal of difference in color, saturation of the colors, etc from edition to edition and even book to book from the same edition. This is very common with hand colored illustrations and collectors differentiate between books with "bright" and "dull" plates. Blacker's book is notorious for this and even within the same book there can be a great deal of difference from plate to plate.

Aldam sought, as did Blacker before him, to provide actual specimens of the materials so color, texture, and other properties could be easily referenced. Unfortunately, specimen books like these have always been incredibly expensive and time consuming to produce so they get into the hands of very few fly dressers. The few color reproductions that have been done of the Aldam plates leave a great deal to be desired. Watson's book is the best but he only shows one plate and this is reproduced at about 50% of it's actual size. No one has ventured to reproduce the Aldam as even in facsimile it would be both prohibitively expensive and of limited interest.

[wsbailey]

The advantage of Blacker is he that gives dye recipes some of which I've reproduced. His dye recipes can be pretty sloppy but fortunately he gives his source for dye information. The source is much more precise.