I don't think I'm going in over my waders when I say that James Prosek's paintings will be the gold standard for angling art for generations to come. I am not quite prepared to say that Prosek's fish will endure as Audubon's birds have, though Prosek was being called the Audubon of fish while he was still a student at Yale. During his college years he published his first book, Trout (Knopf, 1996) and distinguished himself as an artist of another kind: Prosek talked Yale into funding a two-year fellowship to fish. To be absolutely fair, the fellowship resulted in another book, Prosek's version of The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton's 1653 classic, which had to wait nearly three-and-a-half centuries for its rightful illustrator. Just in time for Christmas, a new Prosek project has arrived: Tight Lines -- Ten Years of the Yale Anglers' Journal (Yale University Press, 2007).

The Journal itself was yet another undergraduate project of Prosek's. When Joseph Furia visited the Yale campus in 1996 as a prospective student, he had already decided to go to Middlebury, which he thought would offer better trout fishing opportunities. But a cousin introduced Furia to Prosek, who suggested that if Furia enrolled at Yale the two of them could start a fishing journal. He did, and they did. The Yale Anglers' Journal would be, in Furia's words, "a literary publication that explored life through the medium of angling." And so it became.

Tight Lines is a collection of writings that appeared in the pages of the Journal during its first decade, and a brilliant collection it is, a perfect companion for the long cold months between seasons. And of course it is illustrated by James Prosek, which fact alone makes it worth the asking price.

Given a book of this quality and substance, I shouldn't quibble about typos and punctuation -- but I will. (You can take the prof out of the classroom, but you can't take the classroom out of the prof.) In Prosek's preface, he writes of a passion for fishing "...that began when I was nine-years-old." Nine years old should not be hyphenated, but the error is repeated later. In the text of "A Fishing Talk Given at Yale" by Ernest Schwiebert, the name of Dame Juliana Berners comes up, as it often does in discussions of the genesis of angling literature. But two paragraphs later a typo changes the Dame's name to "Bemers." Two paragraphs beyond that I came across a standard undergraduate blooper (italics mine): "Burton...spent decades pouring over the collated books and manuscripts..." I submit that "pouring" anything over ancient manuscripts even once, not to mention doing it for decades, would do irreparable harm to the manuscripts and get the pourer into hot water; surely "poring" is what Burton was doing.

Quibbles aside, this Tight Lines is a wonderful little book and would make a great gift. So would the book of the same name published in 2004 by my angling artist pal Dave Tibbetts. Dave's Tight Lines (Grey Ghost Publishing) is a collection of his wonderful paintings of scenes familiar to many Maine and New Hampshire anglers, such as the pool at Upper Dam, the Kennebago River, Rangeley boats and fishing camps. James Prosek may be the greatest painter of fish, but for my money David Tibbetts is the best painter of angling scenes since Winslow Homer.