"Lugers At Random" Disappointment
 

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... :rolleyes:

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

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... :(

guns and ammo / gun report - who cares

:D

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

Agreed. It is a treasure. :)

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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. :)

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.

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

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

--Dwight

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... :D

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! :rolleyes:
Outsourcing is the key word here!

Douglas

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. :thumbup:

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

Funny thread!

Back to eBay... :rolleyes:

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. :rolleyes:

If Ron's comment on Kenyon's articles [January 1996 through August 2006] is correct (and I have no reason to doubt it) that's 128 issues. They're going on eBay and GB for $5 - $10 each, with a few twofer's here & there...At that rate, if I get 2 or 3 a month, it'll take me a couple years to get all 128 issues... :p
Cover price was $5 per issue...

I'm only interested in Kenyon's articles, and I'm scanning them for my personal enjoyment...

I scanned in about 12 years of monthly articles for the Japanese forum, each newsletter was / is about 15-20 pages

and shipping via media mail would probably be about $30 or so

I have done this twice before

Was there a "Nambus At Random"???... :confused:

Rich,
I am considering your offer to scan the articles and consolidate them. I am thinking that it does not make a lot of sense to ship entire magazines a few at a time to have them processed. I think it would be better to go back to my original idea of removing the articles from the magazines and then bundling up those pages to send to you (I would want them returned as I still intend to bind them together in a hard bound format :)). I know an intact issue may have some slight value, but not significant enough to try to maintain the entire 1996-2006 set.

Cut/extract the entire page??? Not cut it up??? That sounds do-able. :)

I don't suppose it matters who you send them to, to be scanned.

I am presently scanning the articles full-page at 1700 x 2338 pixels per page in uncompressed BMP format. That keeps the picture quality intact. :thumbup:

Ron Rich is welcome to it - I had volunteered to scan them - if you want to send him all the cut out stuff, you can.

But my offer is still open, I would then save it into PDF files

Ed,
I didn't mean to exclude you. I have a lot on my plate right now so I don't always keep track of what has been posted. I apologize for my oversight and your ability to scan the articles in a .pdf format would be an easy and compact format for others to use and most welcome.

Rich has offered that "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.”

The best of both worlds would be Rich’s edited scans eliminating extraneous material and compiling them sequentially to considerably compact the final product and then converting his .bmp images to a .pdf format.

If the finished product (regardless of format) is to be offered to the collecting community, then what are the copyright considerations?

I'm not a big fan of PDF files; I can scan them as BMP's and then burn them to a DVD & send them on to Ed. Ed can then reduce, convert, or edit them

Presently I'm saving the entire page (ads & all) just because it's easier. But cropping the partial pages isn't that big a thing. I think they will all fit on one DVD.

We could even pass the paper pages around and see which scans look best.

As for copyright rights...I know nothing!!! :D This conversation never took place! And this thread won't be here!!! :thumbup:

I ain't no bunkhouse lawyer but does copyright apply when you do not intend to sell the articles?

And since the last article was over 8 years ago, does copyright even apply???

Then there's who owns the copyright...IIRC, the writer signs away his rights to the magazine, and as long as the material isn't sold it can be freely distributed...

We could always hire Eric to defend us... :thumbup: :eek: :p

OK, this really strains my memory...But IIRC as long as you attribute the author and the publication, you are good...IOW, leave the page ID and author's name intact...

Pic below not indicative of actual scan...Just to acknowledge ownership of intellectual property...

Edit: I also don't see any note in the masthead that prohibits excerpts for promotion...Some pubs do; Gun Report has no such disclaimer...

I am sure I don't know the legal issues, but in the meantime this isn't going to happen tomorrow. I won't be able to start hacking away at the magazines until mid-August, so figure nothing is going to be posted/released before September-October at the earliest. Plenty of time for members who are lawyers to chip in if they want to (I am not inclined to pay lawyer fees :)).

Disappointing, as it is a statistical certainty that some of us won't last that long... :(

...But I hope you are exaggerating about 'hacking'... :eek: For magazines I want to save but copy as well, I take the three staples out and extract the pages...I don't expect you to go that far (unless you're as anal as I am), but a surgical cut with a razor blade would be good if you don't care about the rest of the mag... :rolleyes:

Well, I have 21 pages from 7 issues scanned, and another 5 issues coming from eBay... :thumbup:

But there are some real sharks out there...One guy on eBay wants $7 an issue, and on GB a seller wants $9.95 each... :eek:

I have removed pages for archival purposes before. Trust me, I am also very anal. I do not care about saving the rest of the magazine. I have preserved them for a very long time and now it is time to let them go. I am not interested in trying to market them unless someone wants to pay me a very exorbitant amount to acquire the lot.

cutting them out would be a lot more time consuming and a pain in the butt to copy (full page, compared to odd pages, PLUS then you are likely not to have page numbers)

whoever starts the scanning, best to finish it... I have walked into the middle of a project like this and instead of scanning them sequentially, I had to READ each part to make them flow.

PDF is easy to read an article, as you can go, page by page and if they are BMP, what a pain...

I'll leave it to you then. :thumbup:

Ed,
If I cut them out, they would be full page, retain their page numbers, and be kept in the same sequence as published. I think it should be a lot easier to scan individual pages rather than trying scan them if they were still attached to the magazine. I may consider sending removed pages in a single shipment, but I have no interest in trying to ship 128 issues of Gun Report.

Assume 4 pages per issue, that's 512 pages...But not all issues were articles; two of mine are Q&A, only two pages...

Be a stack about the thickness of a hard cover book... :thumbup:

sounds good with removed pages

:cheers:

Rich we can work whatever out for you too (individual pics and PDF)

However you want to do it. I figure 512 pages, if one minute per scan...About 8 1/2 straight hours...Not counting cropping, pit stops, food, dog outside... :thumbup:

Whatever you guys decide is fine with me. :thumbup: