Products

A Few Loose Chapters - Signed Limited Edition

Limited quantity of copies signed by Tom Kelly are available for the holidays Tom says this about his 8th book, published in 2003, “What you have in this book are islands, loosely connected to the same kingdom, but islands all the same. Islands, if you choose, that can be explored singly.” You can start at the front and go through to the back. You can start at the back and come forward to the beginning. You can start in the middle and go either way. Feel free. Like we tend to say in backwoods Alabama, ”Pick your choice.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2003

A Hat Full of Rabbits

“In the fall of 1933 I was in the second grade of St. Joseph’s School in Mobile, Alabama. Classes were to end early one day for the arrival of a traveling magician. He held up his empty hat, reached in and took out a white rabbit. He reached into his hat again and pulled out a live white dove. To our surprise he then pulled out another white rabbit with a little hat on and when the trickster took the hat off a yellow canary flew out. It has been nearly three quarters of a century since this initial misleading occurrence with rabbits and, at the time of that betrayal I had never met a turkey. What I was to learn later was that magicians were rank amateurs when it comes to instances of surprise. Turkeys are professionals.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2006

A Year Outside

A Year Outside, is Tom Kelly’s sixth book, originally published in 2000 by Wingfeather Press. Here is what Tom had to say on the original dust cover: “There is an area, within the continental limits of the United States, that does not exhibit the conditions that appear to be prevalent in much of the rest of the country. It has more timber than it had in 1950 and more of its land is forested. With two exceptions, all of its game birds and animals are more numerous, the open seasons that permit the taking of these are longer than they were fifty years ago, and, except in one instance, bag limits are more generous. Leaving out the pursuit of fish altogether, and taking the decidedly minority position that deer are superfluous, there is an open season of one kind or another from the first day of September in one year, until the first day of the following May, except for one three week period at the beginning of March. If a person chooses to fish, and has some source of outside income, he need never go home at all. The location of this Shangri La is neither the American frontier at the time of the French and Indian Wars, nor the Land of Oz, above the chimney pots and over the rainbow. It is the Southeast Coast of the United States today, at the opening of the third millennium. The purpose of this book is to serve you a slice of one of those years.” Copyright Tom Kelly 2000

Absent Companions

“Every night of my life, nearly, I close the day with a drink, a habit I picked up from one of the characters that will appear later on in this book. The first toast is to the United States, while wishing confusion to her enemies. The second is to the individuals who constitute the title of this book, Absent Companions. These companions are all absent and they are not restricted to persons. There is a dog in the group, and some turkeys, and a military organization. There is also a southern woodlands division, and a couple of locations in the woods that stick in my memory.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2008

Around The Edges 2

Tom Kelly brings you 59 of his best short stories, in 147 paperback pages. The perfect book for readers, young and old, to enjoy essays, humor and tall tales from “the poet laureate of Wild Turkey literature.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2014

Dealer’s Choice

Considered the most humorous book Tom ever wrote. 142 pages Copyright Tom Kelly 1979

Faces in the Crowd

Back in the days when there were only three states in the entire US with spring turkey seasons (Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama), and two of those states, Mississippi and Arkansas had seasons that were only two weeks long, it is highly probable that there were no more than 1500 spring turkey hunters in the entire world. The author’s experience dates from that time. He is a veteran of that very group. The opinions offered in this book, therefore, are truly steeped in antiquity. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2002, 2020

No Place to Hide

Tom Kelly gives us more 9 more chapters, continuing the themes of his previous 21 books. In this collection Tom explores the future of the Wild Turkey, the Hunt and the Habitat, which means the timber industry to Tom. Here is what Tom has to say, ” The mechanics of the turkey’s demise, the tactics used to bring him to bag, the actions of the turkey and the hunter while in the process of the hunt, all come from a single source, the hunter.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2015

Ol’ Tom & Laura

A loving collection of essays that concern the raising a daughter in the Alabama woods— teaching and enjoying a special father-daughter relationship. (Stories from several  previous published Tom Kelly classics.) If you are luck enough to have girl children, this book will bring tears to your eyes. Tom says this about Laura, “To put it in the vernacular of the upper gulf coast, “That there is one good kid.” There is a quotation from a play written by Mrs. Mary Shakespeare’s third child Billy, that covers the matter adequately: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale, her infinite variety.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2008

Payback

“From time to time, at one function or another, people will ask me when I began to hunt turkeys.  When I tell them the truth, that I started in 1938, I often get the same look I would expect to get if I had answered, “As soon as I got back from Appomattox.” My deceased friend, Jim Andrews, whom I consider to be the best turkey hunter I ever saw, went through a 0 for the season one year in the last decade of his career. A 0 for the season did not happen to me this past year because I did scratch one down in the first twenty minutes of opening day, but if I had gone to the last two weeks with my virginity intact, the pressures would have become damned touchy.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2010

Point of View

“To be invited to a turkey hunt, especially a spring gobbler hunt, virtually demanded a relative with a very large heart and no children of his own, or someone with a very lean pocket book who owes the boy’s father a substantial sum of money. All of the above situations had some bearing on my own personal level of experience in the early days of my turkey hunting career.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2012

Take Back In Fancy

“Go back in history as far as you like, back to Daniel Morgan using a turkey call to assemble his riflemen at Saratoga, back to one of those rangy Tennessee infantrymen on his way to New Orleans in 1814 picking up a turkey for the pot, back to Charles Jordan in 1870 along the Tombigbee River or to Henry Davis in South Carolina in 1925. It has always been the same, one man, one turkey, and one piece of ground. It is unchanged as I write this.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2005

Tenth Legion (Limited Signed Edition)

Limited quantity of copies signed by Tom Kelly are available for the holidays! 51 years in print—Tom Kelly self-published Tenth Legion in 1973. He created this masterpiece of Wild Turkey literature by recording into a portable dictation machine while working in the woods. His wife Helen transcribed his words into a book that has become the “Bible of Wild Turkey hunting.” The book has not changed in the past 51 years, even if the dust covers have had many different looks. Copyright Tom Kelly 1973Copyright Tom Kelly Inc 2012

The Best of Tom Kelly Volume II

The success of The Best of Tom Kelly Volume I led us to create a second volume. Tom continued to write of course, and we found an additional 29 chapters of wild turkey essays. This Volume II was published in 2017 and is available in hardcover and e-book.  All of the stories in both Best of Tom Kelly volumes are about turkeys, turkey hunting and turkey hunters. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2017

The Boat

Hardcover Sold Out Almost every man feels the burning urge once in his life to build his own wooden boat.  In this 1998 book, Tom Kelly strays –though not too far–from wild turkeys to narrate the story behind his handmade boat, whose primary purpose was, “that of moving a hunter across bodies of water of one size or another to reduce the distance between the gun and the game.” Since the construction of this boat coincides with Kelly’s career in the timber industry, his humorous narrative embraces both. Copyright Tom Kelly 1998

The Other Seven

A turkey hunter who hit .300 would carry home a turkey on about every third hunting trip and the only way to do something like that, over a period of time, would be to use bait or ambush two hundred yard turkeys with rifles, or shoot anything in feather regardless of its sex, or all of the above. What this book talks about is not the recorded three successes out of ten a .300 hitter has in baseball, but the things that happen normally to turkey hunters. That’s the rest of us, the people  who spend their entire careers operating in “The Other Seven.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2014

The T. H. Kelly Handbook

Tom wrote this book in the 1980’s to give his 600-man Scott Paper woodlands staff a sense of commonality. The book is written for young first-line supervisors—those people who have just entered the corporate world. It is a common-sense guide to being a productive member of any organization. Buy it for your company and see the results immediately. Copyright Tom Kelly 1985

Their Old Inhabitants

“You should understand that as far as the Southeast is concerned, I am only familiar with the conditions that were in effect after 1900. The old inhabitants I refer to were those people and their descendants that occupied the lands after the colonization of North America by Europeans. The really old inhabitants, the ones that were here between the year the last glacier receded and the arrival of DeSoto and his 600 pigs in 1539, were a different breed of cat altogether. It is interesting to note, however, that indications are beginning to suggest that there were many more of these truly old inhabitants than we thought there were, and they had much more of an effect on their surroundings than we have given them credit for having. The so-called trackless forests have very likely never been trackless.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2011

Unfaded Roses

This volume of essays, is Colonel Tom Kelly’s 23 offering from his writing career. Tom helps us revisit a hard life lived to the fullest and takes us back to his earliest years in forestry. He shares a special discovery in a graveyard, his experience on a high school football team, and the harsh Southern culture of post-depression America. This book, Unfaded Roses also contains his journal of a unique 2012 spring turkey hunting season. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2017

With A Little Bit of Luck

When you come right down to it most of our turkey hunting, no matter how much we may pretend otherwise, is covered in the first words of that old English drinking song, “With a Little Bit of Blooming Luck,” I’ll take my share of it. Anytime. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2018

A Fork in the Road

A Fork In The Road, 2007 by Tom Kelly is the 11th edition of Wild Turkey essays. This time Tom has written a “how to” book about Wild Turkey hunting. He wanted to get down on paper and on DVD his methods of hunting. The book includes, setting up in the woods, equipment, calling, map reading, the mosquito machine, patterning your shotgun and… so much more. Tom wrote the book for young people who are just getting in to the sport. However, old veterans of Wild Turkey butt whippings will learn a great deal from the Colonel and his 70 years of hunting experience. Tom wanted to help the boy or girl who is let out of the pickup at dark thirty and is told by their dad, “Go down and sit by the big oak. I will be back at 9am.” The kid has no idea what to do while sitting there for 3 hours, What to listen for or where to look. Tom Kelly knows and tells you how to do it in 124 pages. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2007

A Matter of Context

“The definition of the word context is almost as mysterious as the word itself. Webster specifically defines it as ‘The whole situation, background or environment relevant to some happening or personality.’ It applies perhaps more to hunting turkeys than it does to most other forms of hunting in that turkey hunting is one of the most complicated of hunting endeavors.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2013

Better on a Rising Tide

Better on a Rising Tide is Tom’s 3rd book that contains 22 chapters that previously appeared in several outdoor magazines in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Colonel Kelly writes about Wild Turkey hunting and Southern States including social life and customs. He also writes about the southern timber industry that he was an integral part of for more than 50 years. 22 chapters of pure Tom Kelly prose. “Nobody ever really knows how much of his makeup is environment and how much is heredity — no matter what stories you grandmother use to tell about the gallantry of your ancestors. But there were certain specific things that happened in your formative years that marked you, and sometimes you have the capacity to remember them exactly as they happened.” Tom notes, ”Chapter 20, the Tuning, is the only wedding Field & Stream ever covered.” Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 1995

Infinite Variety

Tom’s title comes from a line in William Shakespeare’s play, Antony and Cleopatra. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale-Her Infinite Variety.”  The phrase easily could apply to the honorable sport of Wild Turkey hunting. As all Tenth Legion members know, there is an infinite variety of birds, hunters, locations and… tricks a bird can play on a human. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2019

Infirm Opinions

Turkeys have spent most of the last two or three years pointing out to me that they have characteristics, habits, and patterns of behavior that I never realized they possessed.  While I may have improved somewhat from the position I occupied seventy years ago when it was first pointed out to me that the noise I heard from across the river was a turkey gobbling, not a dog barking, the last two or three years seem to have been downhill all the way. The path across the first few years of the 21st century definitely has more rocks in it than the path did during the last few years of the 20th.  It may be that I have finally arrived at a decent estimate of just how little I really know (about turkeys). Welcome to the rock pile. Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2009

The Season

This is Tom Kelly’s classic 1995 season, first published in 1996, reprinted in 2019. The Season is the only book Tom Kelly ever wrote that must be read from beginning to end. This 1995 spring season is typical of the frustration all turkey hunter feel when things start out well and end dull. Copyright Tom Kelly 1996 Copyright Tom Kelly Inc. 2019