My collections: every knife has a story

Ask a collector about one of his knives and you will rarely get an answer about steel. You will get a story. The holiday in the Auvergne where he stumbled upon the workshop. The father who put it into his hand without saying much. The auction where he bid one time too many and has never regretted it.

It is these stories that turn a knife from an object into a piece. And until now they were written down nowhere. They lived in their owner's head, they were told around a table, and if things went badly they were lost with him. The knife remained, the story did not.

That is exactly what changes now.

What is possible from today

In your area on aipcl.com and in the customer area of original-laguiole.de, every one of your knives now has its own page. There you can

• write the story of that one knife: where you got it, why this one, what matters to you about it,
• upload your own photos and show or hide each of them,
• put together collections of knives that, in your view, belong together,
• decide whether and what is publicly visible,
• and, if you make it public, receive comments from other collectors.

The two areas are one and the same, by the way: what you create on one side is there on the other straight away. You do not have to remember where you began.

The story of a knife

One field, one tick box, that is all. You write what you would say if somebody picked up the knife and asked: "And this one?"

It need not be literature. Three sentences are enough. The finest entries we have seen so far are the quiet ones: the price that is not mentioned, because it was never the point. The name of the knifemaker who spent half an hour explaining how the spring is fitted. The date on which the knife was first really used.

Once the story is released, it appears on the certificate of authenticity page: exactly where it already says which cutlery the knife came from and who has owned it. Origin and experience then stand side by side, where they belong.

Collections: knives that belong together

A collection is a selection of your knives with a name, an introduction and a few lines about each piece. What belongs together is yours alone to decide. In the first days we have seen the most varied arrangements, and we would have predicted none of them:

• every knife from a single cutlery, gathered over twenty years,
• only handles of grown material: horn, wood, bone, nothing synthetic,
• the five knives that are actually used, while the others stay in the cabinet,
• a collection meant for the children, explaining which knife is one day to go to whom.

The last one has stayed with us. It is not public. It is a letter in the form of a knife collection.

The knives without a certificate too

Not every knife in a collection is a certified Laguiole. There is the grandfather's pocket knife whose origin nobody knows any more. The flea market find. The knife from an entirely different tradition, there only because it brings back a journey.

Those too you can record, with a photo, an origin and a text. They stay in your own area, though, and appear nowhere in public, for a reason that matters to us: the A.I.P.C.L. vouches that a knife on show really comes from the cutlery whose name it bears. What we have not examined, we do not put in the window. For you it is there all the same, complete, with everything you know about it.

Four switches, and they are all yours

Nothing you write becomes public by itself. There are four separate decisions, and you take each one on its own:

1. The knife itself. Should it appear in the gallery?
2. The story. Should the text be shown too, or are you writing it only for yourself?
3. Each photo. One by one, not all together.
4. The collection. Private, passed on through a secret link, or public in the gallery.

What others see, and what they never see

Whoever opens a public collection sees the knives, the pictures, your texts and the name you wish to appear under. You choose that name in your personal details: abbreviated, as your nickname in the community, or not at all.

What nobody sees is everything else. No address, no invoice number, no purchase price, no purchase date to the day. An open list of valuable knives with prices beside them would be an invitation, and not a pleasant one. These details therefore do not appear in the gallery even if you release everything.

And before anything stands in public, we look at it once. Not to write into anyone's text, we do not do that, but so that nothing appears that could harm somebody, not even the person who wrote it.

Talking, not only showing

A public collection can be commented on. Whoever comments is signed in and stands behind it with their name, and the owner of the collection can remove any comment under their knives themselves, at any time. That is deliberate: it is your collection, so it is your house.

We thought long about whether comments should be checked first. We decided against it. A conversation that only arrives the next day is no longer a conversation. Instead, every comment carries a report button, and whoever reports gets an answer from a person.

Why this reaches beyond Laguiole

With an old painting it is called provenance: the unbroken chain of who owned it and when. It decides the value, sometimes more than the picture itself. For knives, nothing of the sort ever existed. A pre-owned knife used to arrive with nothing: no proof, no previous owner, not a line about what it had been through.

With the certificate of authenticity the A.I.P.C.L. closed the first half of that: the origin. With the collections comes the other half: the life of the piece. The two together make something the knife world has not had before.

You can imagine what that becomes in twenty years. A knife changes hands, and with it pass not only its number and its cutlery, but also what three people before you wrote about it. Anyone who collects knows how rare that is, and what it is worth.

For that you need neither own a Laguiole nor be a great collector. One knife that means something to you is enough.

How to start

1. Sign in with your usual account, on aipcl.com or in the shop's customer area. It is the same account.
2. Open one of your knives and write a few lines about it. You can change the text at any time.
3. Upload a photo if you like. One is enough, and you decide whether anyone sees it.
4. Create a collection, give it a name and put your knives into it.
5. Finally decide who may see it: only you, only whoever has the link, or everyone.

Then look at what others have gathered: Private collections. The search there works by cutlery and by knife name. It is worth typing in the name of your own favourite workshop.