Hook Plates

Hook Plate Header

Hook Plates

Most old catalogs and books about fly fishing or tying had pages showing fish hooks either singly or the range of sizes of a particular shape/shapes. I’ve collected these plates from friends (theirs will be noted) and my own books in my small collection. There likely have been thousands or at least hundreds of different hook shapes developed over the centuries man has fished. It would be impossible to show or even find more than a small number of plates. Further, very slight changes of a hook shape would render the plates as not much more than a sleep inducing morphing of shapes. You may find duplicates here and that is ok. Presenting these plates is more than for just the hooks, it is how they were presented.

These few plates are just the beginning of what will eventually be shown here. Be patient and if you have old plates you think would be good to have shown here, contact me.

Often times, the books from which the plates were found in were in various stages of disrepair. Water damage, foxing and just the aging of not always good quality paper. Taking a plate out of such a book presents sometimes a difficult job of eliminating the signs of aging.

This is a plate from an 1889 copy of “Fishing” by H. Cholmondeley-Pennell. The book has lots of foxing throughout it. You can see the damage as it mingles with the type and hooks.

This is the page after hours of painstakingly digitally removing the damage bit by bit. It does end up with a wonderful “old looking” end result but to do hundreds of plates this way, I will not live long enough nor do I find the thought exciting. So, many of the plates here have been converted from colour to b&w which is an easier yet still time consuming process. One that I can manage with a decent attitude. Doing them in b&w does have a negative though. Some detail is lost when balancing the contrast. I have been as careful as I can to preserve as much detail as possible.
Sometimes a plate has many small hooks sometimes interspersed with larger ones. I have limited the size of all of the photos we display here to have maximum width without making it necessary for the viewer to pan from side to side to see all of a particular photo. So, this means that very small hooks may not be too visible. For these plates, we have included larger versions of the plates that the viewer can download and print out if he/she wants.