The Best Sword Show: See you March 16 in Timonium, MD!

Same time, same place. Every year in mid-March, the Maryland Arms & Armor Collectors Association puts on a monumental sales show.

Hope I’ll see you there on Saturday!

Weapons: The Subtlety of the Modern Sports Sabers

Collectors of modern sports weapons face a bit of a dilemma. It’s almost impossible to tell a piece of recent scrap metal found in the back of the club armory from a weapon with at least budding historical value.

Luckily, some old fencing equipment catalogs provide a clue at dating and contextual placement. Like the 1938 catalog of Vince Fencing Equipment, Inc., which provides some clues to early sports sabers…

Italian-School Saber: “Slipping the Leg”

Since we just reviewed and edited this posting and still have one more article on Italian-style sports saber in the pipeline, we’ve decided to make this “Eye-talian Saber Week” at SHotS Fencing Classics…

Massed Assault: The Choreography of Group Instruction

Group class vs. individual lesson?

The armed and police forces of the world had their choices made for them by virtue of the very number of recruits needing instruction.

But how did they get them to look good from a distance…

Secrets of the Sword: How to maintain a perfect edge

The purpose of this site is not just to make you spend hours on end surfing and downloading free pics we paid an arm and a leg for to acquire.

Our mission is to discover to you the true Secrets of the Sword.

Revealed today: How did cavalry troopers make sure their blades had a perfect edge?

Follow-up: 1796-Pattern American Saber

We’ve received a number of questions regarding the American “War of 1812″ saber we described in a previous posting.

Several inquiries touched on the valuation of a weapon like this.

We dug up a few references…

Weapons: The 1796 Light Cavalry Saber in the War of 1812

For Americans, the year 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.

What kind of edged-weapons gear and literature can we dig up from this period?

Book Review: The Art of the Dueling Sabre

We’re reprehensibly behind in our reading—and in the writing of reviews. And we apologize for the unhappy circumstance that Christopher Holzman’s recent Art of the Dueling Sabre may have eluded your Christmas list due to our negligence.

That’s why we hasten to make amends…

In Memoriam: William Gaugler

FencingClassics bids a fond farewell to an old mentor, friend, and adviser:

On December 10, 2011, one of the great fencing masters, scholars, and authors of the 20th century, Maestro William M. Gaugler, died of  cancer in Sunnyvale, California.

We appreciate what you’ve done for us…

The French Connection: Christmann’s Practical Self-Defence

Readers of The Lazarus Smile will no doubt remember that it was F.C. Christmann, Professor of the Art of Fencing and Member of Several Academies, who started the whole darn mess by handing Ernst Moritz Arndt a stack of classical manuscript scraps. But unlike the Byzantine cascade of events that find their preliminary end in the Sherpur Cantonment Cemetary in Kabul, his self-defence advice is straightforward…