Book Recommendations for the Knife Steel Nerd

Update 10/29/2020: Since writing this article I published my own book called Knife Engineering: Steel, Heat Treating, and Geometry. Of course I still recommend the other books on the list below.

Thanks to Ben Wendel, William Brigham, Jeff Schafer, and Simon Moeskjær Balle for becoming Knife Steel Nerds Patreon supporters!

There are many metallurgy and steel metallurgy books out there. I’m sure the budding steel enthusiast often changes his mind about diving in when presented with all of the options. Reading the works of others has become a different experience for me after starting this blog, where I often notice the shortcomings of my own articles when seeing the superior writing of others. Below I have described a few of the major ones so that you can get a better idea of what you will find if you decide to read one of these excellent books:

Steel Metallurgy for the Non-Metallurgist

This book is perhaps the best known available on the topic of metallurgy for knifemakers, written by emeritus professor Dr. John Verhoeven. It was originally titled Metallurgy of Steel for Bladesmiths & Others who Heat Treat and Forge Steel. Dr. Verhoeven did an excellent job of teaching basic metallurgy and relating it to steel, along with a few specific examples related to knives. He has a very simple writing style that is easy to understand; he doesn’t get mired in caveats or excessive details. The book is tight and focused, and he tends to the side of simplifying things and going one layer deep to provide an introduction to metallurgy. He uses some excellent metaphors and comparisons to help in understanding steel such as the use of water-salt phase diagrams to aid in the understanding of iron-carbon phase diagrams, or photos of bubbles in a bottle to understand grain boundaries. The book is deceptive in its approximately 200 pages; he doesn’t waste a single sentence and you can’t skim over anything. He focuses primarily on basic metallurgy such as phase diagrams, steel microstructure, mechanical tests of steel, steel transformations, and short introductions to different major steel groups. This book is a very good starting point for someone who doesn’t know any metallurgy. The original book was released as a free download but the rights to the book were purchased by ASM and published with the new title. Some have hosted the original file claiming that it is still legal to distribute but that is no longer true. I recommend buying the hardcover or checking it out from the library, but I can’t stop you from downloading the original.

Iron, Steel, and Swords

This book is freely available on the website of the author, Helmut Föll: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html This book was also written by an emeritus Materials Engineering professor, only Dr. Föll is German. These retired professors are working too hard! It looks like the book came out in 2015 though he mentions in another part of the site that there is an unfinished chapter. As you can tell by the title the author does cover a significant amount of material on the history and properties of swords. Dr. Föll has a very personable style where he frequently lets his personality out, rather than hiding it behind technical language. As he says in his introduction: “If you have ever tried to get some information about swords and steel, the Internet provided you with plenty of stuff. You have found hardcore science articles, more or less incomprehensible, and straight balderdash, to use a polite word that starts with ‘b’.” He uses few references, many photos, and uses repetition or emphasized phrases to illustrate certain points. The combination of his personality and use of imagery and metaphors makes it very entertaining reading. Despite his rejection of academic styling, he often gets more technical than Verhoeven with the use of fundamental principles such as thermodynamics and dislocations. However, he does a very good job of explaining all of these principles to the reader who is willing to try to understand. He didn’t stop at fundamental metallurgy, there are sections on the history of steel, the history of swords, effects of alloying elements, and how the metallurgy applies to specific sword and edge properties.

Tool Steels

I wrote about the history of this book in this article: The Development of High Vanadium Steels, M4, and the First Tool Steels Book. My favorite is the 4th edition by George Roberts and Robert Cary which was released in 1980. It has most of the information from the 1st through 3rd editions with many additions. The somewhat more recent 5th edition (1998) was a condensed version though it also had some updates based on the more recent research available at the time. The books focus primarily on specific tool steels including how to process them (forging, annealing, hardening, etc.), microstructure, toughness, hardness, wear resistance, etc. It uses a simple framework to describe the properties of the different types. Its greatest contribution is all of the specific studies that are present on a wide range of topics such as the effect of a snap temper on cryogenic processing, effects of heat treatment on size changes, effect of degree of forging on properties and microstructure, and way too many more to mention. This book focuses less on fundamental metallurgy like the two above and more on practical information on specific steels. Because all of the information is scattered across the different steel types, you may never learn everything there is to learn from this massive book. You can focus on the chapter that covers a steel you may be interested in, such as D2, but then find that there is information on another steel type that is still relevant that you never noticed. This is an amazing collection of tool steel knowledge. However, because of its huge size and amount of information, the book definitely became more and more ungainly and disorganized as each new edition came out, which probably explains the smaller 5th edition. With casual reading there is much to learn, though with dedicated reading there is even more.

Tool Steels: Properties and Performance

This 2016 book by Rafael Mesquita feels like a more modern version of the classic Tool Steels books. While information is given on a few specific steels, Mesquita mostly covers what gives tool steels the properties that they have, rather than the properties and processing of individual grades. He does this by breaking up things into two major categories: carbides and steel matrix. Tool steels (and most knife steels) are greatly controlled by the size, shape, volume fraction, and hardness of their carbides, and Mesquita makes this much more explicit than the three previous books on this list. After reading this book you will have a much better understanding of what makes D2 different than A2 (hint: it’s the carbides). He also covers how powder metallurgy and sprayform technology affects the carbides and therefore the properties of the steel. While the original Tool Steels can be a bit daunting in its huge size and coverage of so many steels, this book is a readable size and is much more organized and focused in its approach to teaching what gives Tool Steels their different properties. It also is much newer and therefore has the benefit of more recent research on tool steel. 

Messerklingen und Stahl

As you can tell by the title, this book by Roman Landes is only available in German. That is unfortunate because the book has the most of any on this list about how different steel types and heat treatments affect knife edges. The book starts with knives first and fills in the metallurgy that is required to understand how steel affects knives. He defines many concepts such as sharpness vs cutting ability, “edge stability,” toughness, and others. He discusses slicing vs push cutting, and how the carbides in steel affect how the steel can handle different types of edges. While the book is only in German I have had relatively good success by using the Google Translate app on my phone and taking pictures of the individual pages. It is still slower than reading directly in English, of course, but much faster than trying to manually type in things into an online translator. Most of the book is understandable when reading in this fashion.