Dan Lago, Fred Fisher, and David Clark,

An Excel spreadsheet (Microsoft 10, Office 2016, 64 bit) has been assembled that includes a listing of each cutlery item identified in each Queen catalog or sales literature for a given year. While direct inspection of the now available catalogs provides great detail and visual images, a database allows for efficient summary across all catalogs simultaneously. Guides prepared ahead of time using sorting techniques make it easy to get answers and lead directly to any catalog source if additional confirmation is required.

A total of 61 years of catalog entries provides 7,585 items. Catalogs or price lists for nine years (1948, 1957, 1962, 1966, 1967, 1971, 1979, 1985, 1986) have not been found to date, so this project has achieved approximately 86% coverage of the total 70 years when Queen used sales documents. The following 20 descriptive categories are used for each entry: Model #, Handle Code, Pattern Name, Handle Material, Series, Edition Size, Serialized, Number of Blades, Blade Steel, Blade Length, Length Closed, Bolster, Shield, Liner, Pins, Sheath, Source, Page Number, Year.

In order to give a more complete picture of the cutlery items offered for sale within a given year, price lists have also been used. These offer very little information – only model numbers and wholesale prices at that time, but they link introductions of new patterns with a given year. In practice, including price lists means than many categories of knife details are left out – Better breadth but less detail. We simplify Guides by including only a few categories, but each line with a source you can check from an original.

Of course, knives were offered in times when we have a “gap” in coverage, but we have been conservative in extrapolating one adjoining year into another without a dated reference. Even so, very few knife introductions have been associated with these gaps. The most striking example in our experience is the introduction of “button lock” knives in the ’85-’86 gap.