dsutton24
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I've been reading through my stack of Knives annuals. They started in '81, and were kind of similar to the venerable Gun Digests. If you were around in those days, you remember that there wasn't much out there for knife collectors. Knife World (I miss that one...) and Blade magazine were around then. Levine's Guide hadn't happened yet. You had articles in Outdoor life and the like now and then. Somehow, I grew up knowing about Randall and the nearly mythic Sykes Fairbairn. I read everything.
What did '81 look like to a knife collector? Many of the production knife companies were still going, but there were a few trouble spots. It looked like a few of the venerable US knife companies would be merging. One moved a lot of its production offshore to Ireland. There were some Japanese knives being sold on the counters of dime stores and hardware stores. Cheap, and thought to be junk by many. Russia was a mystery, China was kind of stirring a little. European and English knives were around in small quantities.
The 1981 Knives Annual is interesting. Bill Moran was doing wonderful things with his neo-pioneering work in Damascus steel. Jimmy Lyle was going strong, and influencing everyone. Bo Randall was still making knives, he and was asking his customers to be patient when ordering. I doubt he would ever imagine a six year backlog! Drop point hunters were everywhere.
The knives annual heavily featured custom makers, the bulk of the book is devoted to makers I've never heard of. There are a few bits and pieces about factory made knives, but it's thin. The biggest surprise is Ken Warner's writing style. The prose can be weirdly archaic. I guess you have to be really creative when describing about half a zillion knives. The oddest thing is that the whole thing is really disjointed. He would be describing a XYZ knife in glowing terms, and the accompanying photos would be anything but the XYZ. Oh, the XYZ was probably in there someplace, maybe 40 pages later, or ten pages before. Maybe not at all.
By the early 90s things were starting to even out a bit. Russia was starting to kind of close in on itself, many US makers were gone or unrecognizable. The Knives Annuals themselves were much better in terms of readability, and sensible layout. I still have a couple of decades' worth to plow through. It's interesting, I read and re-read all this stuff years ago. It's interesting to relearn some of this stuff.
What did '81 look like to a knife collector? Many of the production knife companies were still going, but there were a few trouble spots. It looked like a few of the venerable US knife companies would be merging. One moved a lot of its production offshore to Ireland. There were some Japanese knives being sold on the counters of dime stores and hardware stores. Cheap, and thought to be junk by many. Russia was a mystery, China was kind of stirring a little. European and English knives were around in small quantities.
The 1981 Knives Annual is interesting. Bill Moran was doing wonderful things with his neo-pioneering work in Damascus steel. Jimmy Lyle was going strong, and influencing everyone. Bo Randall was still making knives, he and was asking his customers to be patient when ordering. I doubt he would ever imagine a six year backlog! Drop point hunters were everywhere.
The knives annual heavily featured custom makers, the bulk of the book is devoted to makers I've never heard of. There are a few bits and pieces about factory made knives, but it's thin. The biggest surprise is Ken Warner's writing style. The prose can be weirdly archaic. I guess you have to be really creative when describing about half a zillion knives. The oddest thing is that the whole thing is really disjointed. He would be describing a XYZ knife in glowing terms, and the accompanying photos would be anything but the XYZ. Oh, the XYZ was probably in there someplace, maybe 40 pages later, or ten pages before. Maybe not at all.
By the early 90s things were starting to even out a bit. Russia was starting to kind of close in on itself, many US makers were gone or unrecognizable. The Knives Annuals themselves were much better in terms of readability, and sensible layout. I still have a couple of decades' worth to plow through. It's interesting, I read and re-read all this stuff years ago. It's interesting to relearn some of this stuff.
I think my first was '83 (might have been '82). Not the easiest thing to get hold of over here, but I did find a couple, cheap, in publisher's clearance shops. I gave a bunch away, about 15 years ago, which I regret, and have lost others over the years (as I have a lot of things). I only have a few now, the earliest of which is '86. I pored over every page, and read every word! 
I particularly admired the Loveless knives, but there were lots of great designs, as well as some strange ones 
Most of the collector's market was fixed blades then, of course. There wasn't much knife coverage in the UK shooting press, back in the 70's, though it increased massively in the 80's and 90's, with US-style gun and survival magazines. I started buying 'Guns & Ammo' in the mid 70's, but 'Soldier of Fortune' always had more knife coverage ('Easyriders' had a lot of Bucks!). I bought a range of US magazines for decades, but Blade was hard to get hold of, for some reason. I started writing about knives myself in '91, for 'Survival, Weaponry & Techniques', which became 'Survival & Outdoor Techniques', 'Gun Mart', 'Combat & Militaria', and a few others, while making my living as a mainstream outdoor journalist 
