Sundry Saturday: Knitting Books

Nearly every time I teach a class, someone will pay me the compliment of suggesting that I write a book. Sometimes I think about it, and I have a file of notes and outlines and ideas. When I get in the mode of book-thinking, I enjoy the perspective-restoring exercises of perusing the 12,517 results that come up on an Amazon search for “knit” in the books category as well as checking out current offerings at my local Barnes and Noble.

Most recently in these endeavors, I  was greeted by the following titles:

• Knit Your Dog
• Knit Your Cat (these are each instructions for knitting up realistic, breed specific stuffed animals)
• Knits for Nerds (with a Star-Wars themed cover)
• Knitted Meerkats (Yep, a whole book of just Meerkats. Check it out!)
• Cast On, Bind Off: 54 Step by Step Methods
• And, right next to that: Cast On, Bind Off: 211 Ways to Begin and End Your Knitting 
• A Kindle book called Manly Knits (with a dramatic skull mask on the front)
• Vampire Knits: Projects to Keep You Knitting From Twilight to Dawn
• The first in a series of Amish Knitting novels. (Yes, there are Knitting novels and Amish novels, and now the two have come together.)

And so on.

When I did some other searches on Amazon, I found 675 results related to the general search “knit scarves,” 786 hits on the search “learn to knit,” and 81 items found on an advanced search of the title “Fair Isle Knitting.”

Of course on Amazon, their searches are like big dragnets, so you get actual books along with every used version any one has put up in the Marketplace as well as novels, OOP books and other detritus,  but you get the idea. There are a LOT of knitting books out there. Truly something for everyone, and I would never mock or judge someone who has a lot of knitting books, because that would have to include myself. In fact on this last search, I found a copy of Beverly Royce’s Notes on Double Knitting for a fairly reasonable price, and I’ve been trying to find that one for years at less than 150 bucks.
So there you go.

But really, with SO many books out there, what stands above the crowd for you? Do you look for a certain publisher? Author? Subject? Availability as an e-book? Have you stopped buying knitting books the way I and many of my friends have stopped buying cookbooks, because all the information you could ever need is available on the internet?

Do we need more knitting books???