Zippo Lighters, An Identification & Price Guide

Russell E. Lewis

ISBN 0-87349-697-3

      

I have seen this book with two different authors credited, but as can be seen above the books are identical. I believe that the book was started by Pope and completed by Lewis after Pope stopped part way through the second cover above was therefore a pre publication publicity version, but it still pops up on Amazon from time to time.  Lewis had written a number of books on collecting for the publisher and seemed a good choice to continue the work. However, it is evident in the book that Lewis's speciality was not Zippo lighters.

The book starts with some general hints and tips on collecting Zippos, such as what to collect and where to find them, then moves on to a brief history of Zippo. Chapter 3 is the inevitable dating guide but this covers the lighter case only. One noticeable thing here is that the photographs of the bases are often repeated, often on the same page!!. Also the photographs are not captioned, so you have to turn back to the date chart to work out what you are looking at.

Chapter 4 covers trading Zippo's and describes a survey of 8707 lighter offered for sale on EBay in late 2003. Next we have a pricing guide, but again this should be treated with some degree of caution as the sample was taken over the period above. Picking a smaller cross section over a longer period would probably have been more accurate.

The largest chunk of the book is taken up with Zippo advertising covering such things as Dealer displays and Newspaper and Magazine advertising. This provides an insight into how Zippos were sold but can also be useful to help you date a particular series of lighters.

Rating - Useful if you can't get Poore or the Zippo Manuals

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