The Book of Griswold & Wagner: Favorite * Wapak * Sidney Hollow Ware

Loved the listings of cast iron part numbers.

I highly recommend this book for anyone collecting vintage cast iron! Very informative and inclusive!

I got into cast iron cooking after getting tired of using teflon, which seems to always fail after a few years of use. I remember cooking on cast iron when I was in high school some 45 years ago and the food somehow tasted better and the cast iron was easy to clean. That was all I knew about cast iron then. After doing a web research of cast iron I found this book. It is by far the best book on cast iron cookware I have ever found and read. I have two other books on cast iron cookware, but they do not nearly go into detail about cast iron cookware history, how its made, who makes it and used to make cast iron cookware. The book gives some suggestions on how to spot some of the best cast iron cookware. This book is the bible of cast iron cookware. BTW it is easy to read with lots of photos of the cookware. It was well worth my investment into this book. If you are really interested in cast iron cookware, this book is for you. This is also a great staring point if you want to get into cast iron cookware. I currently have about 50 pieces of cast iron cookware to meet my every cooking need, I'm one happy cast iron cooking wantabe chef.

This book is a very nice general catalog on Griswold's inventory and production line over the course of the years, and I highly recommend it for people who are interested in cast iron in any shape or form. The end notes of the book, however, describe it as a "comprehensive" and "definitive encyclopedic guide," and I'm sorry to say that it is anything but!As far as providing details on the pieces themselves, it misses the mark quite a bit. Not all the pieces, for instance, have full weight and size measurements listed (i.e., waffle iron). It would have been nice (and was actually expecting to see given the end note) a brief description or mini-history on the pieces themselves, their popularity, their use, how they were advertised, original sales prices, if they included any particular recipes, etc. But found none much to my disappointment! One example for this would be the Griswold Lamb Cake mold. The writers of the book could've mentioned something about the Lamb cake mold and it's history with the Aunt Emma advertising campaign. There are also no descriptions on some of the special pieces with names on them, like the Cliff Cornell skillet. I had to do a google search to find out about Cliff Cornell (an interesting history indeed and found it too bad that the book doesn't mention anything on it)! While the book does say something very, very briefly about the Puritan mark belonging to Sears, it also would have been interesting to know why Griswold decided to make it for Sears in the first place.Other things I would have loved to see in the book included information (again something very brief) about the different molds and patterns that Griswold used (the book does contain a list of the molds and patterns but no brief description about them, it's frequency of use, why Griswold had so many of them for any particular item) or even some information about the casting process with some detail about why and how, say, casting flaws occur.The book does include pictures of fakes and reproductions of some Griswold pieces with descriptive captions, which I really appreciate. But sometimes for me the way in which these pieces were organized and laid out in the book (especially with the black and white small type print and photos) appeared very confusing to me. The typeset for the repros just doesn't stick out from those used when describing the real pieces, and as a result just glancing through the page it was hard to know which piece was real and which was fake for me. Perhaps a seperate chapter just on the reproductions would have been nice to let readers like me know that all the included pieces would be on the fakes, or even just blocking them off, separating them off into a box in a corner would've helped to distinguish them better from the real pieces.If this is a book that one purchases just to identify or know the actual current retail price of an old Grisworld one finds then it is certainly useful, but definitely not worth the 25 dollars for. It just costs way too much especially if it is used for this one purpose.Again, despite all these --what I call-- deficiencies in the book, I still would highly recommend it as it is near impossible to find a catalog of all the things Griswold produced over the years. Kudos to the authors for compiling all these pieces together into a book. But for me as a cast iron fanatic, it's more than just knowing the names of the pieces. Cast iron for me is history and it would've been great to actually have a "comprehensive, encyclopedic" knowledge of Griswold's historic work after reading this book. For that, I have to say, I was quite disappointed.With all the wonderful websites that we find now on cast iron use and collecting (i.e. The Cast Iron Collector, Cast Iron Chaos, The Pan Handler etc.) there's a plethora of information now available at our fingertips and compiling it for a more thorough and expansive version of this book would be really great, I think. In this respect, the book has a lot of potential to actually become as the end note says "an essential reference" to Griswold cast iron.

I am not new at collecting cast iron but i did not have any reference material to refer to until i bought this book. I was not interested in selling, just in buying at garage sales, etc. This book is excellent as far as i am concerned. True, everything that Griswold and Wagner made is not pictured or referenced in the book but it sure gives a good idea of what era and their price for a lot of their products. I don't have much experience with pricing, i have read other reviews that say the values in the book is not correct as compared to prices on the internet. Well, you can look on the internet and compare if you like and adjust the value, but the book gives a good idea of a particular pan made by one manufacturer compared to the same pan made by the other. It has helped me get an idea of value and if i want to sell something i can look on the internet and get an idea of the prices there compared to the book and extrapolate a price that is pretty close to what i have. If someone knows of a better book let us know. I purchased it from Amazon and it came in 4 days and in excellent condition.

This book is amazing. It has a lot of great quality pictures and other information. Great book, price and shipping. Thank you!

This is a very good reference book for Griswold, Wagner, Wapak and Favorite vintage cast iron. The values are a bit outdated - I read that they have not been updated since 1995, however most of them seem to stay fairly true with only some variances to date. The pictures are clear. The historical backgrounds on the different foundries are insightful and succinct, without being boring or lengthy. It is a very good guide to have if you are interested in learning more about different vintage pieces, as well as the different years they were produced. Some molds for certain pieces were only in use during specific time frames, making it invaluable if you want a piece from a particular period. It also covers many fascinating miscellaneous pieces!

I have recently decided to increase the number of skillets in my cast iron "collection". I love cast iron for cooking. I thought this book included a lot of history and detailed information on cast iron and the two manufacturers mentioned. It's not that type of book. However, it is a fantastic book for identifying all the products produced by these companies along with the variances and price guidelines. In fact, it's better than I thought it would be. I now keep it in my car just in case I find a skillet as I'm shopping.

Very informative

Great book

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