Fly fishing’s full of coffee table books, but if you added legs to Andy Mill’s “A Passion For Tarpon” book, you’d have a coffee table unto itself.
A massive volume of 510 pages – jammed with a mix of essays, interviews (of greats like Stu Apte) and a fair amount of Andy Mill’s “how-to” – A Passion for Tarpon is clearly meant to be the definitive volume on fly fishing for tarpon.
And it largely succeeds.
Andy Mills has dedicated a lot of time and money to the pursuit of tarpon, and while I’m unqualified to suggest he’s the best tarpon fly fishermen extant, I will say he’s certainly the best to publish a 500 page book.
Table of Contents (see anything you like?)
A Passion for Tarpon crosses a few genres; it’s a pretty coffee-table book filled with nice photographs, but it also offers a handful of very interesting interviews with heavy-hitting tarpon anglers, and yes – it’s also jammed with “how-to” and scientific information about tarpon.
It even includes episode one of Jamie Howard’s acclaimed “Chasing Silver” series on DVD.
Even includes the first episode of "Chasing Silver"
I’m not a tarpon angler and I’d be lieing if I said I read every word of this book, but I have read most of it and know that – if it were about small streams – I’d buy it despite the sizable price tag.
It’s clearly written and the interviews are – to a small stream guy – more interesting than the articles, but overall, the book holds together beautifully.
I’m Impressed, But…
I’m just going to say it; the typeface the text is set in isn’t really suitable for a book-length project. In fact, it’s a little startling to see amateur typography appear in a book of this caliber.
That tyographically geekish nitpick aside, A Passion For Tarpon probably will find its way onto every tarpon angler’s bookshelf.
The information, interviews, photographs and other goodies will probably be too much to ignore.
See you at the bookshelf, Tom Chandler.
A Passion for Tarpon - 510 pages of stuff about tarpon...
Ok, I’ll bite. Purely for my own (non-publishing background) education, what’s the typeface and what would have worked better?
Mark Coleman(Quote)
I’m a font snob but haven’t seen the book. Tell me the publisher’s design department didn’t use Comic Sans…
Kirk(Quote)
Me, too, another typeface geek here. What’s the deal?
Craig(Quote)
“Most of the text of this book was set in Backslap Grotesque Italic Semi-Detached, a variant of Bangalore Torpedo Moribund adapted in 1867 from a matrice by the Danish chiseler Espy Sans, a character if ever there was one.”
opening sentence from Bruce McCall’s , 1997 , “A Note on the Type”
Sully(Quote)
Too much thick/thin contrast, and as my fave art director would have said, the type “was swimming” on the page:
It’s like an uncondensed, oddly ill-proportioned Garamond – some of the thicker bits actually feel lumpy.
It’s readable – and the design of the book is nice – but you definitely notice it, and not in a good way.
Tom Chandler(Quote)
That’s lame. I’m not a “font geek” but can’t stand it when books are allowed to go to press with migraine-inducing type face. Since I work for a fly shop I will simply wait for it. My all time favorite fishy “coffee-table” book is Bonefishing! by Kaufmann.
Andy Mill has the damned Life of Riley.
Logan(Quote)