About
Glass Bodies is a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras. Not one page per model — one page per family, going all the way down: every variant, its serial ranges, how to tell one from another in a blurry auction photo, what reviewers across languages actually thought, the history of how it came to exist, and where one is for sale right now. This site grew out of a love of finding new rabbit holes — discovering lenses and systems I didn't know existed, and following each one further down than any single source would take me.
Version one covers the Nikon rangefinder system in full depth: 46 S-mount lens families from the 5cm f/1.1 to the 50cm f/5, and the bodies from the Nikon I of 1948 to the 2005 reproductions — every family known to exist in the mount, and a few the reference books miss.
How it's built
Every claim traces to a source a reader can check, and the page says so when it can't: figures that sources dispute are shown as disputes, numbers we computed ourselves are labelled as derived, thin evidence carries a flag rather than a confident sentence, and a handful of findings this project worked out itself are marked as exactly that. Prices are shown as listed, in the currency they were listed in, alongside what that money is worth today. History sections are AI-authored and say so; the identification data they sit beside is checked against published sources and photographed examples.
Live Listings are read from the public catalogs of the shops and auction houses we track — independent dealers on four continents, not just the big marketplaces. No seller pays to appear.
What's coming
More systems, in the same depth:
- Leica M — the other rangefinder benchmark, glass and bodies
- LTM (Leica Screw Mount) — where half our current lenses already have siblings
- Leica more broadly, as the catalog earns it
- Medium format — 120 and its frame sizes, 6×4.5 through 6×9 and beyond
- Hasselblad
- SLRs
- Point and shoots
And more site around them:
- Marketplace — richer buying tools across the shops we track
- Store
- Contact page
- Feature requests — a proper channel for telling us what to build
Spotted an error, or own an example that proves a page wrong? The corrections invitation at the bottom of every family page is the way in — the catalog gets better one contradicted sentence at a time.