Opening of Ernst Leitz Museum, Wetzlar, 30th September 2021

[willeica]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I was fortunate to receive an invite to the opening of the new Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar on 30th of September. My article about the new museum is here.

https://www.macfilos.com/2021/10/11/opening-of-the-ernst-leitz-museum-in-wetzlar/

The museum is more than just about vintage Leica cameras and so I will also post a thread about this on Barnack's Bar.

Any Leica enthusiast should enjoy a visit.

William 

[Al Brown]

Great insight, I am bound to go there very soon on an event. Thanks.

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[sandro]

Thanks for sharing this, William! It makes me want to visit Wetzlar again.

Lex

[willeica]

1 hour ago, sandro said:

Thanks for sharing this, William! It makes me want to visit Wetzlar again.

Lex

Well worth the trip for you, Lex, but note that there is an emphasis on educational and artistic features rather than vintage cameras. There is enough there for the hard core vintage Leica fan, however.

William 

[beoon]

Thank you for an interesting and informative report.

I personally think that the Leica Archive could be developed and enhanced with the assistance of the various Leica groups (Leica Historica, LHSA, Leica Society) and also the collecting community worldwide. It would be nice if a Leica international society could be formed from all groups pulling together?

It is also good that other people involved in the Leica story are now being recognised for their part in the history.

Thanks

Alan

[willeica]

4 hours ago, beoon said:

Thank you for an interesting and informative report.

I personally think that the Leica Archive could be developed and enhanced with the assistance of the various Leica groups (Leica Historica, LHSA, Leica Society) and also the collecting community worldwide. It would be nice if a Leica international society could be formed from all groups pulling together?

It is also good that other people involved in the Leica story are now being recognised for their part in the history.

Thanks

Alan

Thanks Alan

That is exactly what I have in mind. I am due to become Vice President of the LHSA-International Leica Society later next week and I intend to pursue these issues. As I pointed out in the article, there are much more of us outside of Leica AG who have knowledge about vintage Leicas, so it will be a matter of finding something that we can do in a structured manner with the archives. The new LHSA website, which will appear shortly, will have a section with an extensive amount of historical documents, manuals and other material for members. The serial number system based around info@leica-camera.com now seems to working well. So some progress is being made but, you are right, there is a lot more that we can do.

William 

[ironringer]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Thank you William for sharing your informative overview of the new Leitz Museum in Wetzlar. It is certainly worth a visit, and many of us will make the pilgrimage when travel is safe and easy.

Without knowing what "paper" history the Leica Archives contain, I would still wager that there is a vast assortment of vintage Leica literature owned by our Forum members (and other Leica enthusiast groups) that the Archives do not have. In that case the best way we could contribute is to scan our old literature collectibles, and offer them to the Archives for proper cataloguing and storage - as long as the material is publicly available to everyone. This would follow the path we Meccano historians have taken over the past dozen years. With this group input (many hands make lighter work) Meccano enthusiasts around the world have populated reference websites that contain over 90% of the huge quantity of literature (instruction manuals, sales catalogues, leaflets, brochures, price lists, store display material, service notes, factory drawings, correspondence, etc.) that the Meccano company produced in its 90+ years of production, before its modern "plastic parts" era. We jointly produced dozens of thousands of scanned pages of reference information, now all catalogued and easily accessible.

That massive scanning and archiving project naturally (since many of us are engineers) started with the definition of standards for everyone to follow, so there is reasonably consistent quality of the archived material. Consequently, for those of us who can't afford a genuine 1908 Meccano instruction manual (!), there are excellent scans available for anyone to review 🙂.

With your new V-P position at the LHSA (congratulations!) perhaps you can suggest this as our enthusiasts' input to the Leica Archives.

[willeica]

5 hours ago, ironringer said:

Thank you William for sharing your informative overview of the new Leitz Museum in Wetzlar. It is certainly worth a visit, and many of us will make the pilgrimage when travel is safe and easy.

Without knowing what "paper" history the Leica Archives contain, I would still wager that there is a vast assortment of vintage Leica literature owned by our Forum members (and other Leica enthusiast groups) that the Archives do not have. In that case the best way we could contribute is to scan our old literature collectibles, and offer them to the Archives for proper cataloguing and storage - as long as the material is publicly available to everyone. This would follow the path we Meccano historians have taken over the past dozen years. With this group input (many hands make lighter work) Meccano enthusiasts around the world have populated reference websites that contain over 90% of the huge quantity of literature (instruction manuals, sales catalogues, leaflets, brochures, price lists, store display material, service notes, factory drawings, correspondence, etc.) that the Meccano company produced in its 90+ years of production, before its modern "plastic parts" era. We jointly produced dozens of thousands of scanned pages of reference information, now all catalogued and easily accessible.

That massive scanning and archiving project naturally (since many of us are engineers) started with the definition of standards for everyone to follow, so there is reasonably consistent quality of the archived material. Consequently, for those of us who can't afford a genuine 1908 Meccano instruction manual (!), there are excellent scans available for anyone to review 🙂.

With your new V-P position at the LHSA (congratulations!) perhaps you can suggest this as our enthusiasts' input to the Leica Archives.

The extensive historical archives of LHSA went online yesterday https://collection.lhsa.org . You have to be member to access the material, of course. I am going to share this with Leica and see what we can do between us to share the information which we jointly hold. There is a cost element in providing this, of course , for both Leica AG and LHSA.

Here are screen grabs of the main pages. I will probably start a separate thread on this later.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

William 

Edited October 21, 2021 by willeica

[tranquilo67]

Hi William,

Just saw it yesterday and it looks really great. I have some brochures, mainly from the 30's and in German, that are not there. Please let me know if it's of any interest and the way to upload.

Best wishes,

Augusto

[willeica]

18 hours ago, tranquilo67 said:

Hi William,

Just saw it yesterday and it looks really great. I have some brochures, mainly from the 30's and in German, that are not there. Please let me know if it's of any interest and the way to upload.

Best wishes,

Augusto

Thanks Augusto. We are open to putting up more material, particularly material which is not in English. When I was in the Leica Archive recently I was shown a box of old catalogues by Tim Pullmann in various languages, including German, Spanish and English. He asked me about what he should do with them and I suggested we might find out a way of putting them on the LHSA site. That said, they have massive amounts of written material in the Leica Archive and putting all of that online would be a very big and costly operation.

The LHSA project started long before I joined the Board and great credit is due to Doug Drumheller, Jim Lager and many others for the voluntary work and creativity that they put into getting this launched. This involved massive amounts of unpaid work. These things don’t happen by magic. We are now underway with this and I am going to go through my own large collection of Leica material to see what I can contribute. Some people may recall that some years ago Wilson Laidlaw suggest that we do something like this on this forum. We now have a place where we can send our material.

I may do another thread with a call for material. In the meantime, Augusto, I will email you with the requirements for any scanned material which you might send to me. 

William 

[Al Brown]

Leitz Museum hides this gorgeous piece of valuable history... Leica 0-Series , "the oldest maintained Leica", as it says next to the exhibit. It was Oskar Barnack's very own camera, proudly bearing the serial number #105.

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

Edited October 22, 2021 by Al Brown