The library of the Museum of Knives is undoubtedly a great unknown for the citizens of Albacete and the Museum’s visitors, since its content is not exposed in its rooms. However, since the creation of the Museum, the institution has gradually been nourished and increasing basically through donations and cessions of individuals, with minimal acquisitions in this area.
From these documental collections we should highlight:
- Catalogues of knife making companies of Albacete from the twenties onwards, showing the evolution of the manufacturing process of the sector, and other catalogues of foreign pieces, especially from Solingen in the twenties, whose interest is that some of these gathered pieces served as models for folding knives made in Albacete.
- Books of business correspondence covering a period from 1922 to 1932, giving us information about markets, suppliers, relations between factories, their organization…
- Printed material of workshops and factories such as delivery notes, invoices, business cards, old press announcements or artisan knife maker’s cards…
- Sketches and original designs of folding knives manufactured in the fifties, and patent grants.
- Company Statutes (in the twenties), labor relations, payrolls and working conditions,
books with the enrollment of employees since the forties, workers information from the forties to the sixties, opening licenses of establishments, street trading licenses, deeds of transfer of different factories…
- Knife making fairs programs of the sixties and documentation related to them such as brochures with the rules of the contests, the organization of the fair, participants…
- Reproductions of documents from other archives such as the Albacete City Council Archive in what refers to plans and workshops licenses of the early twentieth century, and documents from the Provincial Historical Archive such us press advertisements, images of the fair programs and posters alluding to the subject of knife making.
- And finally, multitude of photographs spanning the entire twentieth century (some of them unpublished) and others taken in the nineteenth century. Photographs of knife makers with knives, workshops, pieces, scenes of daily life, kiosks, stalls of artisans, knife making fairs (stands, documentation, the queens of the fairs, press articles), shops…
Total number of stored documents: 2,000 documents and old photographs.