The Ashley Book of Knots is also a beautifully hand-written book.

https://www.amazon.com/Ashley-Book-Knots-Clifford-W/dp/03850...

Agreed. In fact Ashley (definitive work: the Ashley book of Knots) requires a knot to be easy (or at least possible) to un-do.

I wanted to buy an authentic copy of the Ashley Book of Knots.

When I searched Amazon it became so obvious that most the matches were deliberately of ambiguous provenance and authenticity that I simply abandoned the whole idea and haven't bought a thing on Amazon since. This was over a year ago.

Yes, I have run across this before. And I'm not talking about the Ashley Book of Knots, either. I think there's room for a sensible book that is like a flowchart.

1) What are you tying to what else?
2) Do you have a free end or not?
3) Is this a synthetic rope? Is there a size difference? And other factors that might determine which knot you want to use.

I got a couple of books on knots and this sort of thing wasn't coherently addressed, which I thought was a shame.

This reminds me of the problem with naming knots. The Ashley Book of Knots (ABoK) has been the standard for quite some time, but it is still a difficult problem to index and search. As with this article, many knots, like many folds, have been "discovered" multiple times over the centuries, and naming & giving credit is clearly a challenge. I'm glad to see this article, but I don't see a solution any time soon. As the author explains, different countries claim credit, how would one go about proving provenance? I find it a fascinating problem.

I recently received a copy of The Ashley Book of Knots and it has a fascinating narrative on the origins of the different knots intertwined with great illustrations. Apparently whalers were considered the upper echelon of seaman compared to their brethren that were pressed into service. Whalers had access to a lot more rope for leisurely activities (knotting).

FWIW, I agree. The Ashley Book of Knots is the only book I've ever returned to Amazon.

It's expensive for what amounts to a coffee-table book of old drawings and a history of many superfluous, duplicate, or decorative knots.

A lot of the information is outdated with respect to newer materials and/or the "knot" industry.

A non-mathematical, but much more practical resource, is the Ashley Book of Knots (fondly known as "ABOK"). Clifford Ashley was a sailor who collected knots, and an accomplished painter and writer. If you find yourself in New Bedford, MA, you can see some of his work in the whaling museum (which I highly recommend).

I took a knot theory class as an undergrad, and I don't remember which book we used. It ended up being a pretty superficial introduction to the subject, which is both disappointing, and probably also how I got my first "A" in a math class since 11th grade (which, I would argue, was wholly undeserved)

Several key takeaways:

1. The figure 8 knot is the only 4 crossing knot. If you climb, and use it as your tie-in, you can check that you've tied it correctly by checking that you have 5 pairs of strands in the knot.

2. The figure 8 knot is amphichiral. There appear to be two variants (like the left and right-handed trefoil knot), but they are transformable into each other via the "pretzel" configuration, which seems to be the canonical representation in math.

3. If you coil rope with only overhand or underhand loops and pull it out, you put a lot of twist into it. If you alternate overhand and underhand loops, it pulls out untwisted. This is most easily seen with ribbon, which has two distinct sides.

While that isn't the one I recall looking at when I searched, which was over a year ago, there are multiple low-scoring comments stating that this is a low-quality reproduction of the original. Some speculate it's just being reprinted from the "bootleg" PDF based on what they've received.

> "Unfortunately, this printing is really poor quality. The cover color is off (has a pink hue to every color on the cover), the binding is lumpy, and the pages of the book are so thin the other side shows through. The publishers have obviously skimped on quality materials."

> "Although the book appeared to be new and the dust cover was new, the binding was loose and the paper it was printed on was substandard….my impression was this book was reprinted as in a bootleg copy or something similar. I rated it 2 stars because of the ease of returning the item."

Etc.

I actually ended up just finding the PDF online, I think it was on archive.org, and that's that.

The problem with Amazon is they just throw them all in the same coarse-grained bucket. If I click on "13 new from $53.88" under hardcover, there's just a list of prices with no photos of the actual book I'm buying from the various sources. They're NOT equal, only "new" and "hardcover", it's a total diceroll what you're going to get. If you were to buy every one of the new hardcovers sold there, they'd all be different. I'm sure they'd all be reproductions of the Ashley Book of Knots, but of varying quality.

The copyright is expired on this book, so the market is flooded with random repros of varying quality. And Amazon makes no effort to help the customer assess the provenance and quality of what they're actually getting.

Folks whom like this might also be interested in the Ashley Book of Knots (ABoK).

Since it should be public domain, here's a pdf magnet url:

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9777cb900abc65939b7d2cab9cc36c51ecb7a95a&dn=The+Ashley+Book++of+Knots&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969