The Book of Wagner & Griswold: Martin, Lodge, Vollrath, Excelsior (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

great reference, and good price

If you are addicted to cast iron, as I am, beware. You will find all sorts of things you never new you wanted and may go broke on trying to buy. Informative and useful but know the pricing information is out of date at this point.

Seems like a decent reference book to help ID Wagner and Griswold but better as a 2001 price guide. Yes the values are 20+ years old so mostly irrelevant. Can only defer what may currently be rare or collectible.Very light on Martin, Lodge, Vollrath and Excelsior: only 55 of the 256 pages.Not all pieces or logos are included and little to no reference to unmarked pieces.No notes on features to look for in ID.Does include many of the oddball pieces such as wood stove dampers, toys, ovens/burners, molds, display stands, scoops etc. for Wagner and Griswold.Really wish a more up to date book was available.

Nobody could identify my cast iron pan with an aluminum deflector that fits underneath the pan. I found it in this book and the pan is very old I just love it. This pan is better than all my other cast iron pans.

I love the information that is in this book, but I feel there is a lot more information on lodge cast-iron to learn about !!!

I suppose I'm being a little unfair to write a three-star review of this volume, seeing as I only collect Griswold and only purchased this book for that section alone. A person shouldn't berate a screwdriver, for instance, because it makes a poor hammer, and when you get right down to it, the red book is primarely a Wagner price guide, not a Griswold one. But still, in their zeal to write a second guide with a low percentage of repeats from the first, the authors have presented a Griswold section that feels more like a collection of leftover snippets from the blue book than like an independant guide of its own. One of its most serious flaws in my opinion is its lack of complete price lists for referenced series. The authors show a picture of an unlabled p/n 755 size 8 skillet, for instance (and then incorrectly attribute it to the Iron Mountain series in the caption,) but they neglect to give any pricing information for the size 9 and size 7 skillets in the same series. In the blue book, whenever they showed one size, they were pretty consistant with listing pricing for all sizes of that type. Here, they mostly just price exactly what is pictured. Being partial to the non-Griswold logo products, I'm glad that they included more pictures of Best Made, or Merit, or Good Health products, but I wish that they had included more price ranges on those products, rather than only pricing the size that they show in that particular picture. For instance, a picture of a #10 Merit skillet is shown without giving any pricing for #s 3-9 of the same series. (Ironically enough on that note, even though Merit and Puritan skillets have the same p/n and are essentially identical skillets, his price for the Merit #10 is only about 60% of his blue book price for the same Puritan skillet. That, I don't understand - it indicates that Merit and Puritan skillets don't share common prices, but fails to fill the rift in with a complete Merit price range.) Another issue with the Griswold section is that many of the pictures shown are cast aluminum products -- again, while it's true that they aren't duplicates from the blue book, they aren't necessarily what I was expecting to compose about a third or half of the material in a Griswold price guide. I might have liked to have seen more pricing information on pre-1957 small logo cast iron, too. I realize a lot of collectors avoid it, but it's nice to know how much less it's worth than its large logo elder siblings. And, a little more editing of captions would have been nice. Here and there they call something by the wrong name (for instance, a skillet cover is called a skillet, and so on.) Maybe I'm just being picky, or maybe I was expecting too much Griswold information from a book that was published primarely as a Wagner price guide. But, speaking for the Griswold portion only, I was hoping for something a little more useful. What I got just felt like a loose grouping of everything that was left over from the first time out. It felt like the "deleted scenes" section on some DVD movies. I was expecting an out-and-out sequal. Having said that, what I've glanced at of the Wagner portion looks good. I don't collect Wagner, so it doesn't really interest me. The same is true for the other non-Griswold brands covered in this book: I can't really rate them, because I haven't really tried to use them. Overall, I'd say that this is probably an excellent guide for Wagner collectors, and an interesting if not entirely useful guide for Griswold collectors such as myself.

If you are into cast iron and collecting, you need this book. Great knowledge of cast iron through the years and plenty of pics and descriptions. Not sure on what you have, this would help you determine your iron.

I like most every thing about this book. I can thumb through to see what is what. Difference between Griswold and Wagner, etc.

Libro muy recomendable para aquellos que esten interesados en coleccionismo o para investigadores de menaje y baterias de cocina desde la perspectiva del diseño y la historia.Felicidades a la editorial Schiffer por publicar libros tan bien hechos.

Very informative

YES TOOK A LITTLE LONGER THAN THE OTHER TWO ,BUT WAS OK THANK YOU

Thus booklist a must love it