German Daggers Of World War II - A Photographic Reference: Army - Luftwaffe - Kriegsmarine (1)

I bought this book thinking I would supplement what I do know about nazi daggers. I was sadly mistaken. What you get is a lot of pictures from the author's private collection, big deal. I figure if I can take pictures of my own stuff, I could save a lot of money in royalties and make a bigger profit too. Also, you get pictures of stuff the normal collector won't usually see (so go to a museum) in real life and to me this is like having a book on house painting, and showing pictures of the Sistine Chapel..A total waste.Truly this book is useless for the novice collector and totally useless for the advanced collector. Thomas Johnson, if you are going to publish a reference book produce something that can really be used as a reference source. Your lack of color photos is a real negative. If you would spend less time and space devoted to the pictures on daggers the average collector will never be able to afford, and take more color shots of daggers the normal collector will see then I believe you would be doing a service to the collecting community.

I am very familiar with books published by Schiffer Publishing and the quality of their books is outstanding. I purchased the three (3) volume set of German Dagger books written by Thomas M. Johnson, and the price of the set on Amazon.com can not be beat. I was already familiar with Mr. Johnson's web site and several years ago I purchased a WWII Naval dagger from him to add to my personal collection. This gentleman is an expert and collector of German WWII daggers and other items. These books provide excellent photos of daggers from the different military and paramilitary groups in Germany during WWII, and there are many historical photos that show the dagger awards and presentation. These books contain many black and white and color photos with an excellent attention to detail. There are many daggers in these books that the average collector like myself could not afford because or the rarity of the item and who receiver the dagger. I do highly recommend this set of books for the dagger collector and WWII militaria buff.

I bought this book as I have recently obtained 4-5 Heer and Kriegsmarine daggers, having taken sound advice when buying them, so as to avoid problems.I wanted a decent reference book to research potential future purchases which is why I bought this book, as is often the case the complete reference book does not always exist.The book is primarily a photographic book , which is fine in one sense but it does lack an in depth character examination of each maker's products and whilst period photos are good they did in places take over and s a potential guide for a collector I feel it falls short.There are a serious amount of reproduction and parts daggers out there and whilst the best way to avoid them is to know what to expect this book does not provide a comprehensive coverage of the subject matter.Whilst it is very well produced, photos are excellent and the build of the book is sound I felt that it did not make the contribution I expected it to.

V.GOOD

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