Adrian

Good point Greg. I think everyone who is considering such a project should read very carefully the relevant part from "Craft of the Japanese Sword", as these details are explained there VERY well. I could post a photo of a page if Brian is OK with it.

That's a great advice. I think this protected area should be placed higher then the working area, in order to prevent the accidental "flight" of a tool towards it.

Thanks a lot Dan

Fair enough Jean This being said, I'll add that I already read the chapter called "The Scabbard" from "Craft of the Japanese Sword" (offering a general description of the techniques used by Kazuyuki Takayama) and if anyone can and wants to give me a more detailed advice will be most welcomed . Please us PM to avoid this topic being locked.

Brian, this is exactly why I think that techniques should be discussed in detail. When the info is not available, it's easy to make horrible mistakes. However, if the technique is clearly explained by someone who understands it's details, no one who actually has a brain is going to use sandpaper. Allowing the detailed discussions on saya making may help a lot of cheap blades to be properly preserved in the long run. (no one is going to pay 300$ for a shirasaya + 100$ on shipping + 500$ on idiotically applied custom taxes in order to have a shirasaya made by a sayashi for a blade worth 300$) My 2 p, of course. This is very different from attempting to polish the blade, for quite a lot of reasons. I definitely agree that polishing info shouldn't be posted on public forums as the result of such attempts may be totally disastrous.

Grey, what are the weight and value limits? Would an ISBN number make any difference?

I am very interested in this subject as the wakizashi that I recently purchased came in koshirae but with no shirasaya and the local regulations make shipping it to a sayashi next to impossible. And of course there's no local sayashi. Basically I'm in the same situation as John. Since I sourced all the needed materials I am going to give it a try, so any advice from those with experience in this craft would be greatly appreciated.

Brian, in order to get a confirmed price I need to discuss very seriously with the printer that gives me the best preliminary offer and that's not going to happen until I have a very clear list of pre-orders. I'm not going to make a fool of myself with people that I know for quite some time and who helped me on various other cultural projects. This being said, I propose the following course of action: if we hit 150 interested votes (including the numbers you, John and Ed mentioned in posts made on this topic and the precedent one) this topic should be closed and another one should be opened, where everyone should post his exact pre-order. And when we hit 100 copies on that one I'm going to visit the printer who made me the best preliminary offer, talk all the details, get paper samples, do the final haggling and so on. In the meantime, if we can find volunteers in the USA and Australia, we could figure out if the solution proposed by Grey can work for these two countries (shipping from Europe to USA is expensive and to Australia is mighty expensive). If there's no volunteer it wouldn't make sense to discuss a bulk shipping solution with the shipping company and each order will be shipped individually using the postal service. Maybe the JSSUS could act as a US hub for bulk shipping?

For me it was even harder to understand :lol: Unfortunately none of the printers that is willing to print such a tiny order in offset offers this type of service. If everyone is OK with Markus acting as escrow officer I have absolutely nothing against it

Ed, please refer to the following part of my message: I'm not sure why Brian said that thing about 250$ but it's obviously a mistake. Paypal and bank fees shouldn't add too much if we do this right (I covered this part in my previous message too). As for shipping, individual shipping for such a large book set may get expensive but shouldn't raise over 30$ per set (for US shipping, Europe should be much cheaper) if regular post is used. At this point I'm a bit tired of all these misunderstanding, errors and so on and I'm seriously considering the possibility to do this with my own money. Of course I'm not going to put money up front for free, but I won't be greedy either. (say 15$ per book set). I would still need NMB's support, of course. This way, we could also get read of the suspicions that this could be some sort of elaborate hoax

This video can be considered as a small intro

No. The best quote I have at this moment is for the equivalent of 7337$ but these were preliminary negotiations and I'm fairly confident I will be able to haggle it down to 7000$. Obviously this doesn't include any paypal fees, bank fees and so on. This is for high quality acid-free paper, hard cover with sewn binding. Speaking of the paypal fees and bank fees, since all the project would happen within the EU it would be much cheaper if the escrow officer would be an EU resident. I think Jean would be the obvious choice, of course if he wants to deal with this kind of time consuming effort. This would help us keep the cost down on two levels: 1. The paypal fees for all the money received from other EU residents would be much smaller and most important: 2. The bank fees for the payments made to the print company and the shipping company would be VERY small compared to fees for the same amount of money if the payment originates from South Africa. Of course, if Jean cannot get himself involved in this, we will have to just suck it up on the paypal and bank fees, so to speak. I suggest that in any case, the royalties should be paid directly to Markus by each buyer, as this would avoid another round of paypal fees. P.S. I don't understand how you came up with the 250$ per order figure. It should be 100$ + bank and paypal fees + packing&shipping for each set of two volumes. And that's it. P.P.S. Please understand that this is done based on personal relations as a personal project. Last thing I need now is to "drop us the printers info and we can hash out the details". The printer info and credentials will be disclosed by me to the escrow officer only and that will be AFTER every detail of the deal is negotiated with the printer and accepted by the buyer group. During the kind of haggling that I'm doing these days I definitely don't want to see the printers receiving intercontinental calls about this project :lol: .

OK, since it looks like there is demand for 100 copies@ 100$ each let's see the result of the queries sent out by Brian at "a number of publishers/printer". If he gets a similar (or even better) offer I think it would be better to let him run the whole thing, as some people on this board appear to totally dislike my activity here. If not, well, I'm not the type who backs up from difficult projects . Provided of course that some people don't manage to make me lose the will to even open the main page of the forum :lol:

What job are you talking about? The one that I invited you on several occasions to "steal"? Seriously now, first thing I saw when opening the forum today were: 1. Adam voicing what would have been a legitimate concern if the subject wasn't covered in detail on the topic that preceded this one. Brian posted the link in the OP and asked everyone to read the whole thing. As I clearly stated there that I don't intend to touch any money it's kind of hard not to get some hurt feelings. 2. Denis (DrFox) doing his usual bickering against the project, without any admin/moderator telling him to stop. 3. Alex (blade72) doing the same but in a more sneaky manner. :lol: Well, Alex, I'm just a very different person then you. Three days ago I borrowed for free my satphone (loaded with 1850mins) to a guy who's running the "Marathon des Sables" in Morocco. Did this because he's the image of a charity campaign. Am I expecting something in return? No. I did it because it just makes me feel better. It's something that people like you Alex can never understand. You're probably incapable even of very small things like this one viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15210&start=0 After all, hey, you wouldn't "get" anything out of it . This being said, I must confess that I never expected so much negativity to arise from what is essentially a good will gesture and a lot of volunteer work.

No comment :? I think my previous message is crystal clear. I'm not asking any royalties for the idea of this project, step in and be our hero :lol: . P.S. If you're trying to get this topic locked for replies you're doing a great job. P.P.S. You managed to contradict yourself within minutes. From to If you pass the customer to the shipper you're not offering individual shipping. Please stop hurting this topic now.

I did. They pass the job to a shipping company and chage the customer for it. More then the price charged to them by the shipping company, of course :lol: Again, you said that you have close relatives in this business, feel free to make us an offer for the whole job :D . If it's competitve in both price and quality, I'll be happy to step down and help you with advice on the board :lol: .

Yea, and they charge the customer some extra for that too. And since I also know quite a few shipping companies, I don't see why we should pay the printing company so they deal with the shipping company on our behalf. Unless I'm missing something, of course. I was pretty sure that 100 copies will be easy at this price. I'm already wondering if we couldn't do 200 @60 each :lol: That would be dirt cheap for such a book.

Grey, this is something I'm considering from the begining (the shipping cost would decrease quite a lot this way), however I will have to check out if the surface mail options come with tracking. I don't want to see a package worth 3-4000$ vanishing and then have to fight the Postal Service for a year over the money. And of course it also requires a volunteer on the US end.

Brian, sorry for bugging you about the poll, but there's no need to get hostile, I only wanted to save you further aggravation. (another poll and so on) As for the rest: any printer would handle storage for a while, but not too long. Most printers handle shipping in bulk, but very few handle individual shipping and among those even fewer offer the kind of deal that I'm trying to get. This being said, finding a printer that does the complete job including individual shipping would save me a lot of trouble, so be sure that if I can find such offer I'll present it in a heartbeat. Now, about having a few extras made, what I'm suggesting is the following: let's run this poll long enough so everyone who wants to buy 1 book gets the chance to pre-order and if by some sort of miracle we get close to 100 copies this way, we definitely can order more to cover for those who want to buy two or more. Making less then 100 is impossible, making more then 100 is very good as it will basically lower the cost/copy even further. And I'm sure that getting some extra copies will make a smart investment, as in time this edition will only become more valuable. However there's one thing that I'm not going to be involved into and that's storing somewhere the books and then dealing with subsequent orders, be them individual or in bulk. I'm doing this volunteer effort (which's magnitude very few understand) in order to help an important work reach it's intended audience. Not in order to apply for a slave position :lol: .

Alex, I'm already sure that 100$ can be done. And yes, I've talked just with printers that can do everything in-house. What I'm doing now is haggling for even better paper and so on :lol:

Thank you Markus, this pretty much settles it.

It doesn't even allow multiple questions? I'm pressing this issue because, if you look at the results, there are already 8 votes for options 1-3 and only 3 votes for option 4. Sure, if we don't hit 100 even like this it's going to be crystal clear, but if we do we might actually have just 60 or so real pre-orders. Maybe (if there's no other technical solution) make the votes public so we can figure out if someone did a mistake and use the correct numbers? This is for pre-ordering something anyway, no need to make them private.

I know many more printers. Don't worry, I will get quite a few different prices from each printer, depending on paper, cover, binding and so on. There's going to be choice, that's for sure. If you want you can ask your father and brother if they want to make us an offer, I don't mind it at all. Anyway, the poll is up viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15495 thanks to Brian. It is only available in this section and will last one week.

Brian, there's an error with the poll. There should be technically possible to cast only a vote for options 1-3. If a few people get confused and vote 1-2, 1-3 or 2-3 we will have no clue about how many books can be pre-ordered. I think what you need to do in order to correct this is to make it a two questions poll. A. How many copies of the high quality, hard bound, offset printed books at $100 plus packing and shipping are you willing to buy? 1. a copy. 2. two copies 3. multiple copies (please post and mention the number) B. If the required number of copies of the offset prints isn't reached, would you be willing to purchase a good quality digitally printed set, hard bound, at $180 plus shipping? 1. yes 2. No Or to make it possible to cast only one vote for options 1-3, but I don't know if the forum software allows this. P.S. Also I'm afraid 1 week is going to be too short, maybe you can give it until the end of the month? The Chicago show is during the last week-end of April and news of this initiative may reach people who don't usually visit the forum. Your choice, of course.

Brian, for offset print we need to keep the price at maximum 100$ in order to be able to get 100 pre-orders. It's clear that we won't get 100 pre-orders at 200$. As for the money that Markus gets, 30% of 10.000$ (100$x100 copies) is 3000$ while 50% of 5000$ (200$x25 copies) is just 2500$ and for less books sold and in inferior quality. It would be fair to let Markus decide about it tho. If Markus gives his OK I hope you don't have anything against running the global sticky that I proposed in an earlier message. P.S. For a book of this size it is of paramount importance to get sewn binding.