Jessi Cole
George Denka, Jr. and Brent Rogers have put together a comprehensive guide to collecting turkey calls and wild turkey literature, Turkey Call and Literature Collector’s Guide.
The collectors’ guide features common to rare wild turkey collectibles, with value and pricing based on a sales sampling from 2018-2022. Denka encourages readers to take pricing with a grain of salt, as values are constantly fluctuating and some of the rarer collectibles have seen fewer sales, creating a value difficult to pin down.
Denka first began the guide in 1999, then Turkey Call Collectors’ Guide, and since that first edition, he’s updated the guide four times to reflect current market values and collector’s items. This fourth edition welcomes the literature section, curated and written by Brent Rogers.
For a turkey hunting collector, the guide is essential. It serves as constant reference; a near complete look at the history and modern era of custom call making and wild turkey literature. For the ordinary turkey hunter who has not yet begun a collection of their own, the book alone can serve as a fascinating resource and insight into the ever-expanding world of turkey hunting items.
Listen: Brent Rogers on the Gamekeeper Podcast--Talking Wild Turkey Literature and History
Readers will learn about niche and fascinating calls like turtle shell slates and crank calls, and they’ll enjoy learning about the different styles of yelpers and box calls, wingbone call art, interesting designs of pot calls like the “butter bean.” Readers will learn about the value of calls and books from iconic turkey hunters like Neil Cost and Tom Kelly, and assuredly through this guide, more turkey hunting enthusiasts will come to know the great turkey hunters of past generations.
And as for the literature section, Brent Rogers, known as the “Wild Turkey Historian” has the largest library of wild turkey literature known. The literature section works the same as the call section, listing by known books and going value rates sourced on data from the last four years. Rogers works towards completing his library and serving as the keeper of the new and old history of wild turkey literature, including how-to books, research findings, memoirs, articles, fiction, and more.
If you’d like to buy a copy of the book, you can find it here on Amazon, or you can contact Brent Rogers on his Instagram or his Facebook.
Watch: Brent Rogers and George Denka, Jr. at the Bottomland Book Club Panel at the 2023 NWTF Convention.
