Swedish Leather Book

Not a lot going on Otter Necessities-wise this week.

I finished up the last of the pouches I had ready to lace up yesterday. Quivers in pieces with lots of holes punched. Beer gut re-build stalled for no apparent reason.

I did mark the guide-lines for lacing on a batch of soft pouch parts last night. And an order of nothing very interesting in the way of hardware arrived yesterday. Tonight I really need to do a couple tweaks to the techie-themed MuseCon poster.

So far the highlight of the week has been receiving my Swedish book having something to do with leather, which I ordered a week or so ago from an ABE seller in Arizona or New Mexico.

The title, as helpfully stated on the title page, translates as "There's Nothing Like Leather".  The book is from 1944, which astute readers may note is at the end of WWII. There's a couple pictures of what appears to be a field radio backpack case, but nothing else that might deal with the war. I'm assuming that's because claimed neutrality and sorta-kinda succeeded in keeping out of the war.

Here's the link for the helpful Wikipedia overview, which I resorted to myself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II

Getting back to the book: No, I don't speak or read Swedish, although my paternal grandfather's side of the family are Finn/Swedes (if we're Finns or Swedes depends on which of sibling you asked).

I do, however, have a have some rusty knowledge of German, left over from two years of it in high school, and translating captions from a book about blacksmithing a few years ago.

Fortunately, as I learned from the always-helpful Wikipedia, Swedish is a North Germanic Language, so it's not completely different from the West Germanic German (English, meanwhile, is also a West Germanic language). The Wikipedia article on Swedish language says "Swedish being a Germanic language, the syntax shows similarities to both English and German. Like English, Swedish has a subject–verb–object basic word order, but like German, it utilizes verb-second word order in main clauses" and then goes off into minutia about different types of clauses and phrases, the definitions of which I let leak out of my ears just as soon as I got out of the English classes where my grade depended on them. And I also can't diagram a sentence to save my life, thankyouverymuch.

So, what I'm getting around to is that hopefully with the help of the Swedish-to-English dictionary I ordered and should find waiting for me at home, and an iWhatsit app to access an on-line Swedish-English dictionary, I should be able to make heads and tails of what this book is about.

The ABE description included the subtitle, from which I had thought the book would be about saddlemaking. Looking at the pictures, however, I suspect that it's more likely a history of this company:
http://www.palmgrens.se/en/history

At lunch today, with heavy use of said app, I plowed my way through the subtitle ("A book for all friends of the noble art of saddlemaking" or maybe "leatherworking", the exact word there wasn't available), and most of the dedication, which is to the founder of the company, from his sons.

Hopefully the more I try the easier it will get.