"Lugers At Random" Disappointment

[sheepherder]

I had gotten 6 or 7 copies of the old "Gun Report" containing Charles Kenyon's 'Lugers At Random' articles and thought it would be nice to have them all in one book, which I thought would be the "Lugers At Random" book...I was wrong.

I'm sure that this book with its 416 pages of Luger descriptions and pictures is definitive and enlightening for serious Luger collectors...But it's not his magazine articles...

I was expecting the technical analysis and shop drawings of some of the more esoteric Lugers Kenyon owned/viewed. This is more of a description & pictures of every Luger he has examined, two pages devoted to each.

I'll be putting it in the For Sale section in a day or so, but for anyone else who was thinking that it would be nice to have a compilation of his articles...This isn't it...

[Edward Tinker]

I think there have been reviews of it

Rich, look at the copyrite, you will find it was years before he wrote the articles in guns and ammo

and, at the time, it was the only book out there that had pictures of every type, so it was very valuable without having too much BS - it really is still a collectors book - with type and guess (at the time) of how many made etc. Does it have errors, sure

But its better than some of the newer books

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by Edward Tinker

Rich, look at the copyrite, you will find it was years before he wrote the articles in guns and ammo...

Guns & Ammo??? I was referring to the old articles in The Gun Report...And from the issues I have it appears that his 'Lugers At Random' articles didn't appear in every issue...Making it difficult to pin down a 3 or 4 part article to a sequential series of magazine dates...

I'm sure it has been reviewed here, although I did a Search for a review and nothing came up, and it's a collectors' treasure of pictures and descriptions, but it's just not the articles from which it got its name...

[Edward Tinker]

guns and ammo / gun report - who cares



and a monthly article to be like the book would be, what, a page out of his book each time?

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by Edward Tinker

...at the time, it was the only book out there that had pictures of every type, so it was very valuable without having too much BS - it really is still a collectors book...

Agreed. It is a treasure.

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by Edward Tinker

and a monthly article to be like the book would be, what, a page out of his book each time?

The article parts in the issues I have are 3 - 5 full pages (if assembled) long, but there are 3 or 4 issues constituting the entire article. Again, the issues I have are mostly historical, detailing development of the variation selected. The book, OTOH, simply describes a single isolated Luger, severely limiting the comments, and with only the top and left side pictures.

I was hoping for the historical/anecdotal articles from The Gun Report magazine. I'll have to continue buying individual issues and hoping that the articles continue in the succeeding issue.

[SteveM]

I think it was Michael Reese who had a monthly column in G&A on the Luger. This would be 40 or so years ago.

[Ron Wood]

Charlie published his "Lugers at Random" articles every month in "Gun Report" from January 1996 through August 2006 (his final installment on the .45 Luger). I have them all. They take up a lot of shelf space in the garage and gather their share of dust. I am thinking about carefully cutting out each article and then have them hardbound in a book format. Seems like a good way to preserve some neat reference material in a single volume.

[Edward Tinker]

Ron, would be easy to scan them in, then put into PDF format. You could bind them or keep them digital or both.

Send them to me

[Ron Wood]

Ed.
Scanning them would be a long and laborious process and would necessitate countless re-positioning/re-scanning of the pages to make the images look right. Far too time consuming and tedious for me.
I have considered offering them up for sale, but I would probably ask more than the market would bear, and the shipping cost would be prohibitive (probably 40 pounds of magazines).
I would rather take my approach...it consolidates the information without the extra magazine articles and I still get to keep the info.

[skeeter4206]

I know one way you could do it that would be pretty quick, but not the best format that one would desire. I do it quite often with reports I work on and give to customers where I don't have easy access to a copy machine. I take a digital photograph of just the article that you are wanting to try and copy. It may turn out to be a butt load of pictures with a lot of disc space. But this is one way you could get them to a thumb drive where you could email to someone that has the time and actually wants to sit down and turn all the articles into a single PDF file.

I have also seen hand held scanners that you could just scan over the entire page, where this makes either a JPEG or a PDF format already. Doing this way, someone could take the scans and format, crop and resize the articles to their desire.

Either way would be quicker than scanning on a printer every article one at a time.

Just some ideas to work with.

[Ron Wood]

Glenn,
Thank you for your suggestion, but it would involve an estimated 350-400 photos or scans and I ain't gonna do it.

[Dwight Gruber]

Cutting the pages out of the magazines has worked out fine for me, saves a lot of shelf space.

--Dwight

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by Ron Wood

Ed.
Scanning them would be a long and laborious process and would necessitate countless re-positioning/re-scanning of the pages to make the images look right. Far too time consuming and tedious for me.

Back in '98 when I bought my Vette, the mechanic near my workplace had 'inherited' the paper-bound Corvette parts manuals (two of them), each 1"+ thick. He let me borrow them, and I scanned/copied every page in each for my own use. Took most of a Saturday but I still have them and they are invaluable.

I would be willing to scan your Lugers At Random articles, crop out anything not Kenyon, and compile them sequentially. I don't have PDF capability (that doesn't leave a watermark) but I do have the capability of PSP 10.2 scaling. I'm retired now and don't intend to work a day in my life again, so time is no object.

Sending all at once would be expensive, but as it is time consuming, sending a couple inches at a time would work.

The Post Office has a special rate for 'media mail', so it wouldn't be a great expense.

Since I'm the one who wants them, I would be willing to pay the postage, and make the resulting scans available to members. How could be worked out later.

...My $.02 worth to Luger posterity...

[Douglas Jr.]

Originally Posted by Ron Wood

Glenn,
Thank you for your suggestion, but it would involve an estimated 350-400 photos or scans and I ain't gonna do it.

C'mon Ron, as we said down here, "take the scorpion out of your pocket" and pay some teenage with plenty of free time let's say $100.00 ? - and he/she will do it in a blink of an eye!
Outsourcing is the key word here!

Douglas

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by Ron Wood

Charlie published his "Lugers at Random" articles every month in "Gun Report" from January 1996 through August 2006...

That's eleven years; assume 12 issues/year = 132 issues. Again assume 4 pages per issue = ~528 scans (full page). I have seven issues here; the pile measures 7/8". 132 issues @ 1/8" each is 16 1/2" stack. Passing 2" at a time back & forth (whether to Ed, me, or whoever else) wouldn't be too much of a burden.

Finding the right size box (to send back & forth) would be the hard part...

[lugerholsterrepair]

Funny thread!

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by lugerholsterrepair

Funny thread!

Back to eBay...

[lugerholsterrepair]

Rich, I literally have a 4 foot square pile of boxed up gun magazines from the 40's-50's..a little of everything but mostly NRA mags. I have threatened to haul them to the dump as no one wants them..I just can't bring myself to do it.

[sheepherder]

Originally Posted by lugerholsterrepair

Rich, I literally have a 4 foot square pile of boxed up gun magazines from the 40's-50's..a little of everything but mostly NRA mags. I have threatened to haul them to the dump as no one wants them..I just can't bring myself to do it.

Understood. I currently have two feet of Vintage Motorsport magazine ["the journal of motor racing history"] back issues. I sold another two feet to a Canadian collector about five years ago. I've also donated several feet to the Buffalo VA Hospital, but after 9/11 they stopped taking donations.

I don't want to dump them, but it's a small niche that appreciates them.