The Literary Fly Fisher

A former student sent me a Pittsburg Post-Gazette article today, about S.A. Neff, Jr. Mr. Neff is an avid fly fisher, and he is well-known for his custom bindings of angling texts. His work has been exhibited at the American Museum of Fly Fishing and elsewhere. Anyone familiar with antiquarian books will know there is a long history of collectors having favorite texts rebound with high quality covers. Of course, there are also those angling authors, who had certain of their own editions bound in unusually high-quality, hand-worked boards. I have seen Neff’s work before, but I did not know anything about the craftsman himself.

The article sent by my student is titled, “Fish or make books? S.A. Neff Jr. of Sewickley does both (April 3, 2016). Its author, Marylynne Pitz, provides a bit of information about Neff, but describes his book binding and angling texts collection in greater detail. Of his complementary passions–book binding and fly fishing–Pitz writes:

The same hand-eye coordination required in trout fishing has served the 78-year-old well in pursuing his piscatorial passion. Hand-tying a fly takes skill and patience. Creating a leather-bound book or a drop-back box that holds letters requires artistry, craft and a microscopic level of attention to detail.

Pitz also notes there is a documentary about Mr. Neff and announces an upcoming showing (see picture). The film is The Bibliophile as Bookbinder–The Angling Bindings of S.A. Neff, Jr. (2014). I have not seen the film, but I look forward to doing so, now that it is on my horizon. In the meantime, you can read more about Mr. Neff in the Spring 2000 issue of the The American Fly fisher: Journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing (26, 2: 2-11) and in the January 14 issue of Sports Illustrated. In the former, you will find numerous pictures of his work.

This entry was posted on April 4, 2016 at 6:03 PM and is filed under Environmental Literature, Fly Fishing Literature, The Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.