The Illustrated History of Weapons Knives, Daggers & Hand-Combat Tools

This is an excellently illustrated book. This is coffee table quality printing. The images are from the BERMAN MUSEUM of WORLD HISTORY in Anniston Alabama. It shows a great many of the different type of knives of a great portion of the world. Most of which were collected by the name sake of the museum. Outstanding introduction to the worlds knives.

Very good color photos of the weapons and good descriptions. Certainly worth the price and time to read for historical weapons buffs.

There are some major errors in the photo captions but lots of nice illustrations. These foreign knife guides always seem to find the worst possible examples for their American Bowie knife chapters. This is the first time I've seen a cheap, Indian tourist blade passed off as a Bowie though.

knife makers like me love to read it

This book is for a birthday, and I am sure he will love it.

Book arrived with part of Page 33 torn out

[N.B: This review has been heavily edited based on a conversation I had with the book's author 10/10/2014]Let's start with the positive: there are some very nice photos in here, some I had never seen before, and has proved its use in my reference library. The text is not perfect, but it is not bad or wrong as such, simply that due to the scope of the work and the size of the volume there is only so much one can cover, and much detail is lost, alas.As noted in my reviews of Dr. Tobias Capwell's similar book I lament the all too common approach of covering all knives from deepest prehistory to the modern day. Much too broad a subject to give any justice to this subject especially with such a slim volume.I originally only gave this book One Star, because some of my intellectual property had been taken in violation of Wikipedia fair use agreements. Basically, if something is uploaded for free you cannot turn around and use it in a for profit work, such as this.It turns out after talking with the author, who read my review and sought me out, that it was in fact the Publisher that did this; it was entirely their responsibility to secure rights, permissions, etc. while the author simply provided the text. Unfortunately, the Publisher dropped the ball completely.What happened was this: the publisher, looking for pictures to illustrate this book, picked some material out of Wikipedia, including a picture that I uploaded, that featured three daggers in my personal collection, one of which I hand forged myself. The details can be found at my blog: angantyrs-games-things(DOT)blogspot(DOT)com (note that the title of this particular post will be updated along with the content to reflect what I learnt today, but should be easy enough to find once you get to the main site). The publisher failed to seek permission (which I may even have granted, had they bothered to ask), so they created a bit of a mess.With this understanding in mind, I've upped my review to three stars (which, sans the IP mess, is what I would have given it), since it is a solid average book for this broad topic and a useful addition to my library, at least. I and the author (who has much less control than you might imagine) hope that the publisher will clean this mess up at some point.

This book helped me meet my goal of a superficial history of bladed weapons. I thought it was very interesting and the pictures showed the majestic beauty of some of the most amazing man-made creations ever. This is not a book to learn more about different types of steel or materials or even different types of grinds. It is very effective at skimming the top of the iceberg of knives, daggers and hand-combat tools. It is a great resource for someone who is just setting out on the journey of bladed history. It whet my appetite and encourages me to continue to learn more.Thank you David for finishing this work. I appreciate it.

excellent coloured pictures! excellent book, excellent present!