Bamboo Rod Making: Making Split Bamboo Bait Casting Rods from Finished Blanks by Donald A. Bell

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In 1936, a rodmaker with thirty years of experience under his belt took out advertisements in the back of a number of sporting journals. His name was Don A. Bell, and he had just authored a book on rodmaking called Making Bamboo Rods. It was a book unique in the annals of rodmaking.

Bell's book was not your ordinary rodmaker's work. Instead, it was an introductory work on one of the most overlooked of all the rodmaker's subjects: the split bamboo bait casting rod. In this work, Don A. Bell showed an appreciative Great Depression audience how to make a superb bait casting rod from a finished blank. With chapters on selecting bamboo, the parts of the two-piece casting rod, attaching the ferrules, winding, varnishing, rod staining, and even determining the weight and length of rods, it contains some charming descriptions of the rodmaker's art.

With the text taken from the second updated edition, and with all of the original illustrations reproduced, this slender but elegant little volume may just teach you to appreciate the bamboo bait casting rod, and perhaps inspire you to make one yourself! It will certainly help you to better appreciate, understand, and identify the tell-tale sign of bamboo rods (both fly and bait casting) built by the techniques discussed in Bell's book.

Long unavailable to even the most ardent collectors and book hounds, Bamboo Rod Making will now take its place on the shelf of students and historians of rodmaking. It will no longer be one of the forgotten rodmaking texts in history.

Edited and with an introduction and appreciation by Dr. Todd E.A. Larson, this is the fourth volume in the Fly Angler's Desktop Library.