Sometimes things seem to appear out of thin air... during the countless hours I've dedicated to research of old lenses, their history, construction and attempted (and hopefully even succeeded from time to time) to uncover some of the secrets surrounding them, I somehow never even stumbled upon the name of this book:
"The Zeiss Index of Photographic Lenses" by Willy Walter Merté
Well, the author certainly can't be considered a nobody in the world of optics... and so it's even more surprising to me, that this title seemingly never came up during my reserach. Recently however, it did and when I finally understood what it is, I was absolutely floored... I know that most (sizeable) manufacturers of optics documented their lenses well and also did a lot of testing, research and documentation when it comes to the lenses of competitors, but the efforts of Zeiss seem to have been in a league of their own. Apart from M. Wilkinson's Lens Vademecum and a couple of well known books (A. Cox, H.M Brandt, R. Kingslake) I've never seen so much condensed information about lenses (all across the board) in one place.
The write up in question was apparently done after the war and translated into English from German for US institutions. But the majority of information might have already existed in the Zeiss archives and just been re-edited by Merté. I don't have any concrete information on that though. Unfortunately the only version I've been able to find is not only of very low quality, but quite chaotic due to lots of duplicate pages (some with notes about errors etc.) and also partly in disarray when it comes to pages etc. While I'll certainly manage to get some order into this document, I just wanted to ask if anyone here owns a higher quality copy of this book or knows where to find one.
"The Zeiss Index of Photographic Lenses" by Willy Walter Merté
Well, the author certainly can't be considered a nobody in the world of optics... and so it's even more surprising to me, that this title seemingly never came up during my reserach. Recently however, it did and when I finally understood what it is, I was absolutely floored... I know that most (sizeable) manufacturers of optics documented their lenses well and also did a lot of testing, research and documentation when it comes to the lenses of competitors, but the efforts of Zeiss seem to have been in a league of their own. Apart from M. Wilkinson's Lens Vademecum and a couple of well known books (A. Cox, H.M Brandt, R. Kingslake) I've never seen so much condensed information about lenses (all across the board) in one place.
The write up in question was apparently done after the war and translated into English from German for US institutions. But the majority of information might have already existed in the Zeiss archives and just been re-edited by Merté. I don't have any concrete information on that though. Unfortunately the only version I've been able to find is not only of very low quality, but quite chaotic due to lots of duplicate pages (some with notes about errors etc.) and also partly in disarray when it comes to pages etc. While I'll certainly manage to get some order into this document, I just wanted to ask if anyone here owns a higher quality copy of this book or knows where to find one.
