Free casting books: eight you can read today

Every book on this page can be read today without paying, borrowing or joining anything, because its copyright has expired or its author has given it away. They are hosted where they belong — Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and one author’s own site — so each entry links out instead of copying the file here.

The rule that frees most of them is simple: in the United States, anything published before 1931 is in the public domain. Six of these eight were published between 1890 and 1928. Most are page scans with an OCR text layer, so you can read them on screen, search them imperfectly and zoom into the plates; the file sizes are large and the typography is of its period.

Where to start

• To learn to cast, from nothing: Glover’s Handy Guide (1890) — forty pages, eleven graded exercises, the clearest short course on this list.
• For casting as a discipline: Darling’s Tournament Casting (1907) — accuracy, distance and the roll cast, written by a competition caster.
• For the physics: Herron’s Physics FOR Fly Casting (2025) — straight lines, what the rod does, what the line does.
• For casting buried in a proper manual: Shaw’s The Science of Dry Fly Fishing (1907) — chapter one is a complete 36-page casting course.

Casting, and nothing else

A Handy Guide to Dry-Fly Fishing, with a Series of Graduated Exercises for All Who Wish to Learn It — Richard Glover, writing as “Cotswold Isys”, 1890. About 40 pages. A shilling pamphlet built entirely as a course: holding the rod, driving the fly, casting up-stream, across-stream, and the horizontal cast. Free because it was published in 1890, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library states it on the item page. Victorian diction and “whip” for rod, but the progression still works.

Tournament Casting and the Proper Equipment — Lou S. Darling, 1907. About 120 scanned pages. Four of its nine sections are fly casting — accuracy, obstacles, and the “switch” or roll cast — the rest is bait casting and the contest rules of 1907. Public domain by date; the Library of Congress scan carries “unaware of any copyright restrictions”.

Physics FOR Fly Casting — Mark Herron, 2025. 38 pages, a small clean PDF with selectable text. Straight lines, what the rod is and does, what the line does, and the other casts. Free under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, stated on the author’s site; link to it rather than republishing an edited copy. Aimed at casters who already cast.

Casting inside a bigger manual

The Science of Dry Fly Fishing and Salmon Fly Fishing — Fred G. Shaw, 1907. About 400 pages. The most casting-dense old book here: chapter one is a 36-page course — back cast, forward cast, steeple, side, wind, accuracy, distance, loop — and the salmon chapters repeat it for the two-handed rod. Also here: changing direction, the Galway cast, curved casts, the Spey throw. Public domain by date; the item page itself carries no rights banner.

The Complete Science of Fly Fishing and Spinning — F. G. Shaw, 1915. About 540 pages. Three consecutive casting chapters from p.147: the science of casting a trout fly, different methods and styles, and “mental control of the muscles when learning to cast”. The rest is entomology, trout senses and spinning. Same author as the book above, with some recycled material.

Modern Bait and Fly Casting — J. B. de M. Thompson, 1928. About 260 pages. Fly casting is Part II, from p.153: the art of fly casting, fly rods, lines, leaders, reels, and casting for trout and bass. Part I is bait casting. Published 1928, so it entered the US public domain on 1 January 2024.

Fishing with Floating Flies — Samuel G. Camp, 1913. About 135 pages, and the one re-keyed text on this list: read it as HTML or EPUB instead of squinting at a scan. Chapter IV is “How to Cast the Floating Fly”; the rest is equipment, where and when to fish it, and the insects of the trout stream. Project Gutenberg records it as public domain in the USA.

Trout Fly-Fishing in America — Charles Zibeon Southard, 1914. About 370 pages, with a clean text layer. “A Few Words About Casting the Fly” is exactly that; “The Fly-Rod and Its Function” is the better chapter, and the rod-action argument is still recognisable. Public domain by date; the Library of Congress scan states no known restrictions.

What is not here

The books most people recommend first — George V. Roberts Jr.’s The Fly Cast, Lefty Kreh, Joan Wulff, Mel Krieger — are still in copyright, and Internet Archive lends them rather than serving them. The two long books in this section, the CI Study Guide and Master the Cast, are hosted here because the site’s owner asked for them; that is an exception, not a policy.

Links checked at the time of writing. If one of these breaks, tell me and I will replace it.