Anyone own a copy of Wengers book "A fervour Over Knives"??

[tosh]

Basically as the title suggests.

Does anyone here own a copy of this book :-

Wenger : A FERVOUR OVER KNIVES
 
What's your honest opinion - is it worth seeking out?

Anyone

[ICanFixThat]

Yes, It's great.  Covers Wenger's early history very well.  Honest book that airs quite a bit about Wenger's history with labor problems and such.  Some nice pictures that have helped me.  ... and ... Basically it's the history of Wenger professionally done, not sugar coated and very interesting... now with Wenger making a big change in their history it's more useful than ever.  Good Luck!

[ICanFixThat]

Also I will say if you liked Victorinox's book "The Knife" then you'll most likely like the Wenger one.  If you didn't then you may not like the Wenger one.

Also there were 3 pdfs floating around on the history of Wenger "Early", "Middle" and "Forward".  These PDF files are actually extracts from the book and give you a small glimpse of what is in the book.

[J Mackrel Jones]

It is interesting that Wenger's centennial book, printed 9 years after Victorinox's (at that time very much their competitors), is exactly the same size - but sideways comparatively:  The Knife and its History (red cover) is taller than wide, A Fervour over Knives (blue cover) wider than tall.
Both great histories of the companies.  The Vic has more about the history of world cutlery, the Wenger more about how their company dealt with changes.  Vic's first chapter is The Stone Age; Wenger's first chapter is Of Knives and Men.
The Wenger has cooler photos.

[Sazabi]

Anyone know of current sources for the book that isn't in the $100+ range?

[tosh]

Anyone know of current sources for the book that isn't in the $100+ range?

There's a copy on amazon - $395.00. I've already made some enquires but after seeing the scans the seller 'BKlady52' sent I've now all but quashed the idea. The internal pages do look crisp and clean BUT the front and back cover certainly aren't.

[enki_ck]

$395.00

Well the sellers figure if the collectors can pay cca $1000 for one knife, they'll surely pay $400 for a book on those.

[ICanFixThat]

I know I paid a few hundred the first time I bought a copy.  I had checked with a few long time collectors and they confirmed they are pretty rare.  I can't remember off the top of my head how many English copies were printed, but I think I said in a thread somewhere. 

You have to find someone that does not really know much about the book to get it at a good price I think.  Maybe with the changes at Wenger more will be showing up for sale, but in the past it's been very hard to come-by.  If theer were more available the price would drop, since the number of buyers willing to spend a couple hundred on it are probably limited.

The covers are cloth, and the artwork is not a highres crispy production, so digital cameras without care might make the covers look old, even when they are not.

[gw8433]

Who will upload a PDF edition for shareing?

[Northern Geek]

Who will upload a PDF edition for shareing?

Pretty sure we're not supposed to do that here..

[North Man]

i would love to read it, Wenger should make a copy of it in a budget version i do not need to own the original book

[J Mackrel Jones]

There were 1200 of these printed in French, 800 German, 500 English.

[North Man]

500 in english is not many

[Mud Shrimp Moe]

$395.00

Well the sellers figure if the collectors can pay cca $1000 for one knife, they'll surely pay $400 for a book on those.

It's the shame the copyright holders won't release at least an e-book copy. I'd probably give $9 for a Kindle copy, which is $9 more than they'd be making by not selling it at all (all of it pure profit after Amazon's cut). I'm sure not pay $100+ for a paper copy.

[ICanFixThat]

It's the shame the copyright holders won't release at least an e-book copy. I'd probably give $9 for a Kindle copy, which is $9 more than they'd be making by not selling it at all (all of it pure profit after Amazon's cut). I'm sure not pay $100+ for a paper copy.

The $9 would not be pure profit.  It would take some equipment and people's time, and thus money, to make an ebook. Depending how the book was created in the first place that could be quite a bit of money to recover.  There is a chance they already have the book in PDF format since there were the PDF excerpts, but there is some indication that those were created separately.  Then like you mention Amazon fees. 

The audience for this book is very small, so the total copies they could expect to sell would be quite low.  Thus an ebook may not even be economically viable, let alone profitable. Given that the original publication was an expense that they almost certainly didn't directly recover, I can certainly understand them not being in any hurry to create an electronic version, especially since the centenial is well past. 

That said they might do it one day for historical reasons, or after the copyright expires someone else may decide for some reason to create one.  Maybe once they no longer are producing SAKs they may create another book for the historical record, or someone else will.

[Mud Shrimp Moe]

All good points. Pure contribution margin, I should have said. There would certainly be fixed costs, although I don't think they need be that material. With high speed auto-scanners nowadays, converting a hard cover book to a quality PDF file is simple and cheap. I'm less aware of the conversion to Kindle format. However, I can convert PDFs to Kindle format at home using freeware. It's not professional quality, mind you. But I would guess doing it at a somewhat higher quality isn't a huge hurdle.

Nevertheless, I'm not arguing with you that if Victorinox doesn't want to do it, then economic return might not be enough to convince them otherwise. Could even be negative. You're right the prospective market is probably quite small.

[ICanFixThat]

I would have to disagree on the costs if they needed to go the route of hardcopy scan to create the content.  Which really is not suitable for a modern ebook since it would all be images, which they could then OCR, but that has it's own issues. Of course they would not produce something that was not of a suitable quality.

I work with this industry and although we don't get quotes for books 1 at a time (we'd probably do that inhouse), I can tell you it's costly to use a professional service that knows how to do it right.  Doing it professionally often means destroying an actual physical copy.  If you have a larger contract you can offshore it to india or something, but that's probbaly not practical here.

That aside I would suspect they have most of the content in some electronic form, or more likely various electronic forums.  Which is better, but making a professional ebook would be an expense.

So like you say, if they don't want to do it for other reasons, I just don't think it would happen based on economics given the money already spent for a the fine research and production project of the orginal book, and it would seem the time for this has passed.  Maybe we can expect something wonderful for Victorinox's 150th birthday.

[tosh]

Well I gave in and bought the copy off amazon - the seller offered a reasonable discount ($50) but the shipping tracked all the way to the uk was $59. I specifically asked the seller to mark down "the" purchase price to $25 to avoid hefty uk import duties which would have pushed the price up an additional $100+ !!

It's been a VERY expensive year so far. I recently picked up the "Heritage", the "Giant" and ofcourse thanks to Wenger (New York) and Steve (tattoosteve99) the elusive "Survivor" that I'd been chasing for more than a year!!

My only remaining Wenger to get will probably be one of the "Titaniums" and possibly the Black-Out and A Wood version, then I'm done! Thank God!!
I need to draw a line somewhere otherwise the collection becomes so big it actually loses it's impact - I think my total Wenger count is somewhere in the 20's.

Once I've bagged the remainder, I'll post pics.

[ICanFixThat]

Let us know your thoughts on the book. I hope you feel it was worth it in the end.  After you read it though you may 'need' a few more knives.

[tosh]

Let us know your thoughts on the book. I hope you feel it was worth it in the end.  After you read it though you may 'need' a few more knives.

lol, No! No more knives!!
Maybe the Titanium, Blackout and possibly a Hardwood?? - but that is definitely it.
The Giant is remarkable value for money, in the sense that it contains almost the entire toolset Wenger ever released for the 85mm model. By contrast, to purchase all individual models would not only be vastly more expensive but also take up far far to much room.
As for the book - it is certainly worth it. There were only 500 copies ever released in English!! I now know that Wenger does still have a number of copies locked away in their vaults for archival records and will NOT sell - I tried, believe me I tried.
I haven't read too much of the book as yet - I'm scared stiff my 5yr old young son will spill his juice all over it or worse. So, it's kept out of the way at present and retrieved as and when I get "Me" time! Given wengers recent announcement the book will probably increase significantly in the distant future.

It wasn't easy, I had to sell a fair bit of stuff via ebay to raise the necessary funds to buy it all. Indeed if Wenger hadn't announced their intention I wouldn't have bought them.