This work examines the roles that American businesses and photojournalists played in the early overseas marketing of the Japanese-built Nikon camera and its Nikkor optics between 1946 and 1951. Particular attention is paid to the San Francisco-based Overseas Finance and Trading Company, which was the major U.S. importer of Nikon products between 1949 and 1953. The work also details the roles of Overseas Finance leaders Hans Liholm and Adolph Gasser in providing marketing and technical guidance to Nikon in the company's formative years.
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Michael "WES" Loder has lived in eight different states including two years on the Navajo Indian Reservation. He has been an Air Force officer, a professional photographer, photo technician and audio-visual specialist. He worked as an academic librarian for more than 30 years--25 of those years as the Head Librarian for the Schuylkill Campus of Penn State. In between all these jobs, he helped raise three children, learned to play the highland bagpipe and designed and help build his own passive-solar, off grid home in the Lehigh Valley.
Wes started writing when he was seventeen and has since completed over 25 stories, mostly aimed at young adult readers. His adult histories include The Nikon Camera in America, 1946-1953 , Paul Gill and his Long Beach Island Art and the more recent The Tenax II: Zeiss Ikon's Precision, Fast-action Camera. Taken Beyond the Ohio is his first venture into historical fiction for younger readers.