4 comments about 35 Vintage Sweater Knitting Patterns from the 1940's - 1960's KINDLE Ebook Download (knit, knitted, women, clothing, clothes, yarn, crafts, tops, shirts, knitting instruction, make clothes).

1. First, I would like to point out that this book has an "unlimited device usage" license -- meaning that if you buy it, or know someone who has bought it, it can be shared with any number of your friends and family -- the only requirement is that y'all would need to download the Kindle software for PC or have a Kindle. But this is a very generous license.
   
   The collection of sweaters in this book are great and many are classic timeless styles that would look great today. Many feature 3/4 length sleeves which I love and are still in style. The sweaters have classic lines which would look good on a wide variety of figure types.
   
   That said, in order to knit any of the sweaters in this book, a fair amount of "re-design" will be needed in order to make the projects practical for "today's woman". As others have pointed out, the measurements for the sweaters given are for women who are much smaller than today's size 12, 14, or 16. So you will need to choose a yarn, do a fair amount of swatching and rewrite the patterns for your size. However, the great thing about many of the projects in this book is that the stitches and patterns aren't so complicated that this is undoable -- it just takes a little time and fairly straight-forward math.
   
   Frankly, I like the patterns in this book better than many of the newer books that have come out recently. For example, there are several patterns for cardigans and I like most of them better than Cardigans Pattern Book by Louisa Harding. You'll have to work harder to bring them to life, but you will have a design which is classic yet unique and flattering.
   
   Just a wonderful collection -- particularly for the money. If you are the kind of knitter that looks at patterns more as "triggers" for your own designs and like adapting to your own purposes, this is the perfect book for you. If you are an intermediate knitter that wants to get started with designing your own sweater, this is also a great reference since you won't be starting from scratch -- you have some structure and between the instructions in this book combined with a good Knitting Design book like Designing Knitwear will give you the tools you need to adapt these patterns for your own purposes.



2. Excellent value, a real find. Many of the sweaters are quite lovely. Once I get a bit more confident in my sweater alterations/design skills, I will definitely give one or more of these a try. I am not sure how to update these to modern yarns and techniques.
   The sizes are quite different than modern patterns. For example, size 12 seems to be today's S or XS.
   I wish there was a table of contents. I added bookmarks for my favorite patterns but I don't know a way to easily navigate to the next bookmark.



3. Not all of the patterns have promise, but the majority do & they have LOTS of promise. And if you have imagination you can make most of them work with modern yarns & a few small pattern changes. Definitely a keeper!



4. Having learned to knit in 1946, I am, by definition, a vintage knitter and love making the old patterns in today's beautiful yarns. The kindle formatting is well done but this book is in dire need of an Index or Table of Contents! I think the best "work around" for this is to place a bookmark or Note on the first page of each pattern. I'm looking forward to other vintage finds.

4 comments about Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide.

1. This wonderful, very well-done and in-depth manual is filled with all the background info you need to dive into the world of vintage magazines -- we recommend it highly.



2. I've been interested in old magazines for a few years now, and have been looking for a helpful price guide. I just bought this, and I highly recommend it. There's a lot of information, not just about the magazines most of us are familiar with, but also about many lesser knonwn older magazines that have great value due to authors who published their early work in them--e.g. Edgar Allen Poe. It's not just helpful information as a price guide, it's very interesting reading! Lots of great color photos also. I looked through another magazine price guide in a bookstore, and this one is much, much better.



3. I picked up this book to learn more about vintage ads and magazines I was interested in. I was pleasantly surprised that not only was the book a complete guide to magazines but had great analgoies and stories the "editors" wrote within.
   Great information on a subject that seems to be little explored.



4. When we moved into our 1920's home,we found boxes left in the attic filled with old fashion magazines. My husband was ready to trash the lot, but being of the pack rat variety I found a home for them in my office.
   
   With the help of The Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide the door was opened for me to the world of old magazines. The beautiful color photos helped me to easily identify my boxes of "trash" and give them a value.
   
   Most important, the love affair the authors have for magazines comes across in their historical entries. The unique way they organize collectible magazine people into Sleepers like OZ artist W.W. Denslow or Stars like F.Scott Fitzgerald makes me want to haunt local yard sales. My major problem with the book was that I became so fascinated that I wanted more. The book could easily have been double in size and information and kept my interest as both a reader and for use as a desk reference. With what I've learned, our next home will hopefully be an 1890's Victorian with a basement full of Godey's Lady's Book magazines.

5 comments about TV Guide The Official Collectors Guide: Celebrating An Icon.

1. Excellent guide for new collectors and those unfamiliar with the TV Guide hobby, like myself. Spectacular graphics, great year-by-year index listing and informative value guide. I bought this book second-hand at 80% off the list, making it an unbelievable value.



2. The book pictures every TV guide cover ever issued. I needed to find a cover from 1966 for some artwork and it was listed. Values for each issue are also listed. I found the book gave me exactly what I was looking for.



3. Enhanced with more than 3,700 full color covers from America's most popular, iconic, and widespread weekly magazine, "TV Guide: The Official Collectors Guide" compiled by Stephen F. Hofer (Curator of the Philo T. Farnsworth Television History Center, Auburn, Indiana, and who himself is the owner of one of the largest collections of TV Guide magazines and memorabilia in the United States) covers all the national and regional digest size covers from April 10, 1953 to October 9, 2005. Included are TV Guide foldout covers, holographic covers, and multiple covers. For the antique dealer and hobbyist collector, each issue has the current secondary market prices listed. Featuring memorable quotes from TV Guide and from television shows, "TV Guide: The Official Collectors Guide" is more than a price guide compendium, (and a superb history of the magazine itself), it is also a very highly recommended tour of American television programming through more than fifty years of popular culture.



4. This book has several major flaws. For a start, there is no index. The only way to locate covers with your favorite stars or shows is to browse the pages year-by-year.
   
   The price guide only gives values for "mint condition" issues, with no guidelines for how to adjust value for copies in less than mint condition. (Most collectors' guides give a range of prices based on condition.)
   
   It would have been nice if they had included some lists, such as: the most valuable issues; issues with multiple covers; people who have appeared on the most covers; etc. All of these things are mentioned in the text, but there is no way to look them up except by browsing every listing.
   
   Despite these flaws, this is still an invaluable book for collectors, because of it's comprehensive checklist.



5. I was so happy to receive the TV Guide Official Collector's Guide, it is a great publication!! It has a lot more information than I expected - comments by stars over the years and much more!! It is very colorful and I will enjoy reading it for years to come. My 45 year old son has a collection of TV Guides and I know he will be interested in seeing the publication to see if the ones he has are valuable! Thank you

2 comments about Bad Mags 2: The Strangest, Sleaziest, and Most Unusual Periodicals Ever Published!.

1. This book, is a wonderful, little insight, on a time period, that I find very interesting. Witches, satanism, California, Manson, Tate, and all things, dark, are found here. I wish there were more publications, today, that are found in this book. Not For The Innocent!



2. .....If you are a collector of Mansonabilia and all ephemera true crime related with a dose of Satan and Myron Fass thrown in! I have both volumes of this title and if I were limited to just buying one of the volumes of Bad Mags, Volume 2 would be the one I would pick, in spades! Not that I'm an enemy of Sexploitation and Sleaze, as heavily featured in Volume 1. It's more that Volume 2 is a better tool in the things I collect and a much better reference therefore. Just the photos alone would make this a valuable reference, and the descriptions of all the mags within are succinct and not only useful, but valuable. My only caveat would be that there is not enough color. It must be a typo on the publishers part, but in the ad for the books at the rear of volume 2 it says that both volumes have 8 pages of color, each. Perhaps that was the total of the 2 volumes taken together, but even with the dearth of color, I recommend this title in a big way, especially to anyone interested in the minutia of the obscure and the savagely esoteric. Mr. Brinkman is to be thanked by the rank and file of the great unwashed collector of the bizarre, and no, I'm NOT the Jeff Goodman who endorses the book on it's rear cover, just another in a long line of fans of this type of material who have similar names and tastes....maybe it's astrological, somehow!

1 comments about COLLECTIBLE MAGAZINES: Identification and Price Guide, 2e.

1. Of course not all magazines are here but so many are that you can still get a feel for what certain magazines cost. Some of these listings contain who/whats of each issue, there is a section on monster and adult mags too.

5 comments about It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps.

1. Absolutely Fantastic book.
   
   I was wondering, from anyone else who bought it, is this supposed to have a dust-jacket? My copy didn't come with one. It might be an odd question, but I have stupid silver-fish here and they always chew up the spines of my books.



2. It makes me want to go out and create a parody of one of these magazines. And these things were so over the top sometimes that this wouldn't be very hard...
   
   An excellent treatment of this genre.



3. Wow what a great book. The artwork of these old pulps is exquisite. I loved paging through this volume and soaking in all the great images. I do wish they had included more excerpts from the text portion of the pulps, but the outrageous cover art was entertaining in itself. I highly recommend this book.



4. Well-printed, hardbound, handsome collection of eye-popping cover art and illustrations from men's adventure mags of the 50s through the early 70s. Every kind of trashy, sleazy, paranoid Whitebread-American fantasy is presented here. Hunky guys in torn shirts being attacked by everything the editors could think of: giant ants, rabid weasels, Nazis, Japs, native savages, Leopard Women of the Congo, Commie dominatrixes, you name it. Then there are semi-nude damsels popping out of their tops while being threatened by a similar list of aggressors. Possibly the best one in terms of ridiculousness shows a chuckling Fidel Castro about to burn a tied-up blonde with his cigar. These pictures are so outrageous they go beyond offensive into a strange realm of ironic hilariousness. The only thing more amazing than the subject matter is the fine execution of these paintings. Every page took my breath away as I marveled at the masterful compositions, the deft use of color and lighting, the absolute mastery of anatomy and proportion. I doubt there are any illustrators working today who would be capable of producing work of this calibre, regardless of subject matter.
   My one complaint is that the editor, Adam Parfrey, in his introductions to each section, seems to be defending these covers as a sociological document to be examined from a contemporary Politically-Correct feminist cosmopolitan perspective. (One reviewer here called it "Looney-Left commentary," and I feel that needs clarification.) Sorry Mr. Parfrey, but there is no defense for this material. It is what it is, it's horribly Bad and Offensive and Wrong, but it's _SO_ bad it can't be taken seriously. It's so bad it has become good and can only be enjoyed in the way one enjoys B-movies - by laughing at them, because Now We Know Better.
   Most of the introductory material in the front of the book was interesting and informative: a few interviews and reminescences of what it was like to work on the magazines in their heyday. But Parfrey's article was mostly the kind of art critic / social critic mumbo-jumbo which hides a lack of ideas behind a fog of contemporary academic jargon. As I read it, I suspected I was actually reading nothing ... and in the final paragraph, when he used "traction" as a verb, my suspicions were confirmed. Mr. Parfrey has nothing of value to say, but he did put together a really great collection of jaw-dropping cover art, and I thank him for that. This book is worth getting.



5. These magazines were considered the absolute bottom of the barrel when they were published. To be truthful, they're still offensive today. But now they can be examined in terms of sociology and popular culture. If you don't pass judgemnt on their content, you can marvel at the sheer audacity of these publishers! Nothing was too outrageous to be published in these mags - they define the term "raw." Included is the magazine from which Frank Zappa cribbed his famous "weasels ripped my flesh" line.

   This book has extemely high production values and fascinating commentary, whether you agree with it or not. Wholesome entertainment? No. Fascinating? Yes!

4 comments about Goldmine Comedy Record Price Guide.

1. This is a very well-written and researched book. I'm not quite sure if the author actually likes the subject matter though, since almost every single entry, while informative, looks down on the records and artists that are discussed. He seems to somewhat venerate the old-time radio stars who put out LPs, and almost denigrates almost every other artist who committed comedy to records (with the notable exception of Bill Cosby, whom I think the author has interviewed many times and may have done another book on).
   
   Even with that slant, this is a great compendium of spoken-word comedy albums. You are not going to find a lot of information on 80% of these albums on the internet. I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys the genre, as it is well worth the price ... well, at least the Amazon Marketplace price.



2. For students of comedy, Smith's Goldmine Comedy Record Price Guide is priceless. Those of us collectors who are lucky enough to have picked up a mint Brother Theodore or Bob & Ray On A Platter for next to nothing will delight to see the lofty prices afforded to these and many others. Smith definitely lets his personal tastes be known and his write-offs of such classics as Robert Klein's Mind Over Matter, Richard Pryor's That Nigger's Crazy and Peter Sellers' recorded output may leave some fans confused/angry. But that's the norm in album guides of all sorts. All in all, comedy historian and expert Ronald L. Smith has given collectors an entertaining, informative and exhaustive study of humor on record.



3. Amazing book. The guy not only has every comedy record, but has listened to them all. What I liked best was that he was fair with all types of comedians -- he digs Lord Buckley as well as Homer and Jethro, Mort Sahl as well as Jackie Mason, and tells you what their best records are. I also found out I have some albums worth BIG BUCKS! Yeah!! But he doesn't say where I can sell them. Great to find a book that's worth the money. Photos of album covers were good, too. Wish there was more of them.



4. The reference is very valuable, though not quite exhaustive. And if anything other than highbrow humor makes you laugh, then try to avoid reading the reviews of the albums, they'll just make you mad. The harsh criticism of record after record makes you wonder if the author actually has a sense of humor.

5 comments about Goldmine's Price Guide to Alternative Records.

1. Yes, there are many glaring omissions, and yes, the prices of many of the records are laughably low. This book's value, however, lies in its cataloging of many popular "alternative" bands from 1976-1996.
   
   Even if you never find them for the prices Neely has listed, at least you'll be able to find out the number of 7"s Rage Against the Machine released, or how many pressings of "Pick Your King" Poison Idea released and which ones were on what colored vinyl.
   
   Admittedly, you can probably find all of the information in the book with some searching online, but there's nothing like having an old fashioned paperback, with a bevy of information in it, right by your side. Flipping through its pages requires no electricity, it gives you a break from the computer screen glare, and will just perhaps shed some light on a group or record you didn't know existed.
   
   And, hey, it's $1.99 from the Amazon Marketplace. How can you pass it up?



2. Tim Neely is very clear in his Intro (or Disclaimer, if you will) that this book is a guide only and could not include many artist. His Intro addresses most of the negative reviews listed for this book. I liked the book and it proved useful to me. Yes, after almost 10 years it should be updated. Thank You.



3. Lotsa errors, omissions and inaccuracies. There's about as much chance of finding some of the Misfits singles for the prices listed in this guide as there is for the Boulder police to ever solve the Jon Bennet Ramsey murder.



4. I really was very dissapointed in the range of music that this book covers. I was hoping to get at least a decent discography of many of these bands, but this volume failed even that test. Having listened to this music in the 1970's and 80's into the 90's and beyond, I take offense to the many glaring ommissions that the author made either by choice or poor research. A few examples are: Psychic TV, Primus, the Muffs, amd Cyprus Hill are a few bands that did not make the cut at all. Steve Albini's original band Big Black is ommited but his 90's band Rapeman is represnted, go figure! (Probobly because by this time he had produced bands like Nirvana, even though Big Black is by far the more influential of his bands) Other bands have only a token mention with only one or two of their discs listed. Examples: Didjits, Naked Raygun, Fugazi, etc. Even more popular acts like Elvis Costello may have his LP's well listed but his Stiff records 45's are completely ignored, likewise Joy Division and the Specials also are poorly represented in the singles department. Especially frustrating to those who grew up with this music is the author's choice to include such modern pop-rock monstrosities as Hootie and the Blowfish and Blues Traveler and other such bands which might find a fine home on most adult contemporary radio stations but can not in any good conscience be considered 'Alternative'. Also if you go into any finer used record store you might be a bit surprised at some of the prices. While the vast majority of record prices have remained constant, he is well off on many of the rarer issues. In conclusion it seems that the author has a real shallow understanding of the heart and soul of the variety of musical forms that are collectively entitled 'Alternative', his viewpoint seems to be that of a contemporary mainstream rock station's music director, strong on the 90's rock but excedingly weak on the roots.



5. This book is the only one of it's kind that I know of...I think it needs to be updated soon though...it is a 1996 pricing guide..Also, it does need some adds on the artist listings section and a CD guide would be great too. It is the only book that I have found that has what I need for Alternative Rock vinyl listings.

1 comments about Signs of Our Times.

1. A nicely designed book about the visual fun along the nations roads and small towns. By the nature of these signs a lot of them shown in this book have probably disappeared by now. How many barns are still standing with a Chew Mail Pouch Tabacco painted on them? The author's note that as companies merge and expand one part of America can now look very much like any other part but surely this has always been the case, a Coke sign looked the same anywhere, Holiday Inn used their 'Great Sign' coast to coast. Perhaps what they regret is the decline of originality (and fun) many small-time businesses put into attention getting signs.
   
   Most of the hundred or so photos in the book are external signs but there are some vintage postcards, matchbook covers and architectural photos. The chapter on motel signs shows the art of the signmaker at its best, arrows, lettering and animal shapes made out of neon, revolving stars, in fact anything to attract the eye of the passing motorist.
   
   John Margolies earlier book 'The End of the Road' covers the same subject but concentrated more on buildings rather than signs, both books capture a vanishing America. Nostalgia fans will love these books.
   
   ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

4 comments about Goldmine's Price Guide to Collectible Record Albums (Goldmine Record Album Price Guide).

1. I purchased this book back in 1997, at that time it was up to date, just
   found my old dog eared copy, and it is still an enjoyable reference guide, but there are newer price guides availble now that I would spend my money on.



2. I found this book to be extremely informative, even though it may be missing many artists and albums in its price guide. The information pertaining to what to look for and what *not* to look for helped me immensely when I decided that I wanted to become a collector of vinyl.



3. I am very surprised about this issue missin many imprtant singers and has alot of wrong information the 4th addition is much much better than this issue.



4. Umphred is pretty sharp and his book is too. There are loads of good pictures and a host of informative essays in the front. The one about the Beatles and about the Dylan rarities are notable, as well as his list of the 100 most valuable albums. My collection is not that big, but I love this book and bought it even though a friend had already lent it to me. Enjoy