WEAPONS! Where might one go to procure something if  …  say… you wanted to reenact the Knights of the Round Table, or Edward James Olmos in Miami Vice*, or find an axe for the cover of Daniel Abrahan’s THE KING’S BLOOD? You go to Weapons Specialists in downtown (or downton if you want to be chi chi) Manhattan. Which is what I did one blistering hot day last summer. Check out the video of my visit and revel in the fact that the folks who work there have THE BEST JOB in the world. I would like to apologize in advance for the rather large sweat stains I’m sporting in the video. It’s like my armpits had a pool party the rest of the body wasn’t invited to. So… yea.

I had very specific details for the axe and the final weapon needed to scream warrior. In other words, the axe needed to look used. Obviously this combination of elements isn’t something that you just find off the interwebs, so I needed to create the final image from composites of multiple weapons.

After leaving Weapon’s Specialists with a rifle case full of medieval cutlery, which by the way is really surreal carrying through Grand Central, I needed to photograph everything and start working on what you see on the final book. Here are the weapons I got to play with.

 
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