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From the collection of Bradford Edwards, Photography by Misha Anikst, copyright Asia Ink and Visionary World 2007.
You can take a closer look at Vietnam Zippos if you follow this link to amazon.com
We've been reading Sherry Buchanan's Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories 1965—1973 (from the collection of Bradford Edwards).
It's an intriguing book, illustrated with hundreds of photos of engraved Zippos, with informative explanations of the inscriptions on the lighters, and with brief descriptions of the historical and cultural setting in which these folk art relics emerged.
So we decided we'd give you an excerpt from this fine title, artist and Zippo collector Edwards' essay on 
how his collection came to be.
Indianapolis
Photo © copyright 2008 Robert Frank. From The Americans Steidl/National Gallery of Art, 2008.
The Americans: Photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published in Paris in 1958, and was recently re-published by Steidl and the National Gallery of Art.
Frank “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film,” wrote Jack Kerouac in the introduction to the first American edition in 1959. He continued: “To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.”
American Ethnography got our hands on a copy of the Steidl re-issue, and we give you 
This, Upon Reading the Americans.
Photography and Sociology: In 1974 sociologist Howard Becker published “Photography and Sociology” He wrote: “Robert Frank’s […] enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville’s analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.”
Becker has gratuitously allowed us to re-publish the article for our readers: Photography and Sociology.
So, this story is about one guy, his name is 8 Deer Tiger Claw, which is almost the coolest name ever except his brother's name is 12 Earthquake Bloody Tiger which is totally what I am going to name my son. Seriously, dude, I really am! So this guy 8 Deer is a lord or something, in a place, I think it's in Mexico, way back, I mean seriously waaay back, and he, like, rules this place big time. He's just roaming around, conquering, and becomes this super powerful guy, and he hooks up with all these chicks, too, but it's like totally strategy, man, only so that he can get more military influence or something! And at one point this fierce looking dude, who's using a dagger made from bones or something, pierces 8 Deer's nose, and 8 Deer is totally like “cool, no problem,” sitting there with this look on his face like he can't feel the pain at all. And 8 Deer is down with all the priests and everybody, man. But he's got a lot of enemies, too, so this one guy kills his brother in a sauna or something. But 8 Deer like totally takes revenge. And then a bunch of other weird shit happens, too. It's sooo cool, you have to read it! The book is called
They sell it over at amazon.com. Here's the link.
Here's a review of the book. It was written in, like, 1902 or something: 
REVIEW OF PEABODY MUSEUM'S EDITION OF CODEX NUTTALL
So, Codex means book. And Nuttall is the name of the lady who went to Europe and like totally rediscovered this thing. She is dead now, she died in 1933, but some guy wrote her obituary: ZELIA NUTTALL
Codex is a book … you know, with separate pages where you turn one page over to get to the next page. Originally this thing wasn’t a book at all, it was just one longass sheet, and you read it from right to left and up and down. But when they wanted to turn it into a book, that one-sheet format, or whatever, wasn’t going to work. So they turned it into a book with pages. That’s why it ended up being named Codex, I guess. But you still have to read it from back to front, which is kind of cool. It’s like Manga, or something.