I recently purchased a Kodak Retina lllC and am trying to find the year it was made. The top plate has 61727 below the cold shoe and the lens has 5389466. Is there a site that lists manufacturing dates for these cameras?
There aren't too many resources to get to an exact date. Here is one, but it really describes how complex the serial number strategy was more than anything else:
According to this Wikipedia article, the big-C Retina III was only made for two years, so yours (and mine) probably from 1957 or 1958. It is possible that going through some of the books from the bibliography would reviewl more information.