Price List For Old Swords

[Jussi Ekholm]

Well as I've mentioned few times that I have a "sword database" that I am building and I've also mentioned that I have some online prices stored up. As I am not a commercial guy I thought I'd share the price list to NMB. Sharing is caring right? 

 

The idea for this came to me some years ago as I was constantly listing the few favorites for potential purchase, and that list was evolving all the time. As I removed sold ones off and saw that I started to get more expensive swords to the list that I could not even dream of getting. So I thought I should just let the swords stay in list even if they were sold.

 

Here are few words about the price list, there are about 1750 swords listed, I have direct links to about 1600 swords that you can just click and they should take you to the sword. About 1250 swords have their prices listed. The really high end swords usually don't feature the asking price. And I have taken out some prices that I've got to know privately, as I wanted to keep this so that all info in this is/has been open to public. And private information that has been said in private should not be in my opinion distributed on open forum. The cut off point in the list is approximately around 1450's (I know I still have few dated ones in the 50's). There might be some errors that I've put a smith under wrong school or tradition (or even have the wrong smith) but I've tried to minimize them and tried to correct most to my actual database. Sometimes it is quite difficult to pinpoint the origin of some smiths.

 

This is kinda barebones version as for example I've put mei and measurements to my real database. I just wanted to have this document as easily viewed and quick as possible.

 

The document has headlines, so when you open it it should be 1.tier Province 2.tier School 3.tier Smith etc. Granted I didn't make headlines for all the smiths. For example there are 2 Sōshū Masamune in the list, so I thought it wouldn't be necessary to make a headline for him as he can be easily found through search or just going to the Province. Once you start using it for the first few times it should be quite easy to navigate. Especially when you use ctrl+f to get the headlines tab open. Then you can just move fast by clicking various schools.

 

The format on the document is like this

 

Smith or School - Type of sword (mei or mumei) - [koshirae] if there is one featured

Length in cm - price of the sword - authentication paper - seller of the sword

Direct link to the sword

 

I might have messed it up in some place but in general the classification arrangement I used would be odachi -> tachi -> katana -> naginata -> naoshi -> wakizashi -> tanto -> others

 

I hope members will find this useful

Miekkojen hintaseuranta NMB version 1.docx

[BIG]

Hi Jussi, Document can't be read..

 

Best

[Rivkin]

Amazing, thank you very much!!!

 

Kirill R.

[PNSSHOGUN]

Wow Jussi, incredible effort! Thank you for this.

[Blazeaglory]

Holy cr*p! Great work Juss! Thanks

[Brian]

Wow! That is a huge amount of work Jussi. Thanks so much for sharing with us.
I think it would maybe benefit from being a spreadsheet in Excel rather than a word doc?

[Marius]

Excellent work, Jussi. Duly saved in my nihonto information folder.

[Valric]

This is fantastic, you put a ton of work into this and it's generous of you to share it with us here. This is valuable reference work. 

 

When I catch a breath with work I'd like to put some time into this and parse the strings to put it into a database-friendly format (e.g. csv). From there we can easily manipulate the data. This could be the start of an interesting and promising project. 

[Jean]

Thanks a lot Jussi, fantastic work

[Gakusee]

Apologies - a question for the technically challenged like me: how does one download this on an iPhone or iPad? I tried several times but nothing happens.

Thank you

[b.hennick]

I just sent a donation to Brian in Jussi's honour. I appreciate, his daily contributions, the work in assembling this data base and his sharing his work with us. If you feel the same way please consider making a donation in his honour. Brian certainly needs the support.

[rkg]

you may want to "containerize" the web sites/links you have listed in the document as well - the web.archive.org addresses may well stay around indefinitely, but none of the commercial sites are under any obligation to leave their data up...

 

Best,

rkg

(Richard George)

[vajo]

Great job Jussi!

[Jussi Ekholm]

I am happy that it can be useful. It is basic .docx format so I don't know what Apple products usually use for Microsoft Word files. Links are mostly working but as has been noted there are few issues with it. One major one was the fact that Richard noted that commercial sites tend to delete unused pages. Here are few that I've found bit problematic. As it's been few years of documenting for these, some of the websites have been upgraded etc.

 

Ginza Choshuya upgraded their website last year I believe and unfortunately lots of info was lost and is not accessible anymore as it was on their old site.

Aoi Art sells an incredible amount of items, and they often use the same page names they've used before. So the link might take you to example other mumei Enju sword that is different the one I listed there 2 years ago for example.

Touken Matsumoto seems to now have deleted most of the info on their sold swords. I figured the format they used for page numbering and was able to see lots of their old sales as pages of the items were still up. I used the same trick on few other sites as well, not exactly rocket science.

 

As for putting the data in excel, well I've kinda mined the relevant info I want from those links into my bigger and better database. So even if they vanish from online I still have some of the info of those swords stored up (no prices on that one). Every one can use the data in this one as they like, I mainly just wanted to have price & paper listed in this one, and I figured Word document would be a fast one to use and easy to have direct links (just noticed I could have had the fast links just as easily clickable in Excel... ). I just added the length as factor to make some sense and organization in this as there are so many mumei swords in here.

 

Even though there seems to be lot of swords in here, the from Heian to early Muromachi span actually makes out a small share of dealed swords. I don't even want to think how many swords there would be if I'd try to add every sword sold by all of those websites over the years. Just wanted to bring this out to newer people who might have not yet watched the sword market a lot. Just to show you as most of us like to browse few popular sites, here are some numbers I counted just now from them (yes some dealers have very large inventories)

 

Aoi Art has about 270 swords up for sale, out of those about 23 would make this list.

Nipponto has about 400 swords up for sale, out of those about 40 would make this list.

E-Sword has about 110 swords up for sale, out of those about 2 would make this list.

Shokai has about 90 swords up for sale, out of those about 4 would make this list.

 

About 870 swords out of which about 70 would make this list. Now I did browse through the websites pretty fast but it should give some idea how rare the early swords are.

[Vermithrax16]

Unreal work Jussi, amazing.

[Jean]

You kill me Jussi, what a work!!!!!

[mas4t0]

I realise I'm a few years late; I didn't see this until earlier today.

 

Attached is Jussi's document, reformatted as a spreadsheet.

 

Miekkojen hintaseuranta NMB version 1.xlsx

[Kanenaga]

Recognizing that prices of things are not static but flow with the general economies, this listing is still a precious document and I for one would like to see it in spreadsheet format. Unfortunately, the link does not work for me.

[mas4t0]

9 minutes ago, Kanenaga said:

Recognizing that prices of things are not static but flow with the general economies, this listing is still a precious document and I for one would like to see it in spreadsheet format. Unfortunately, the link does not work for me.

 

I just checked it (in Chrome on Android and MacOS), and it's working for me.

 

It's hosted locally on this site, so there shouldn't be problems

 

Is anyone else having issues?

[Kanenaga]

Got it now. Thanks.