Von Lengerke & Detmold and Abercrombie & Fitch
 

Doing a little research this morning I ran across this site . . .

http://www.griffinhowe.com/research-main.cfm

Here is a bit of what the site has to say about its research.

"Griffin & Howe is pleased to be able to make available the sales
records of Von Lengerke & Detmold and Abercrombie & Fitch, two legendary
purveyors of sporting arms in the 20th century. The records exist in
over sixty very large ledger books recording sales and inventory between
1901 and 1976. The sales between 1901 and 1929 represent the sales of
Von Lengerke & Detmold which was purchased by Abercrombie & Fitch in
1929. The Abercrombie & Fitch sales and inventory records begin in 1929
and continue through the closing of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1976."

To learn if your gun was sold by one of these 2 "legendary purveyors" is
free. Also free is the date your gun was entered into inventory. To
get a notarized Griffin & Howe certificate listing the information of
sale will cost you 50 bucks.

Thanks for the info! I tried some s/n of vL&D marked Mausers on the site. It's interesting that they invariably found those s/n greater than thirty thousand, and could not find the s/n lower than thirty thousand.

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Just read their whole list. Totally 2,191 s/n were listed. Only eleven of them are smaller than 30,000, and among those, three seem to be typos (56, 5759, & 6545).

(11-3)/2191=0.365% No wonder I hit "higher" guns easier.

Will wait until they input more into the system before I spend my hard earned $$ :)

I believe that a resource like this will ultimately "out" a lot of bogus guns. Bravo!

Maybe we will be finally able to tell if any VL & D marked lugers existed or were sold.

It is interesting that DWM, BKIW, Anshutz, or any other name for a supplier of tyhe Swiss A&F or a VL&D Luger appear on the suppliers list. Stoeger is there and that might be interesting to correlate with Dwigt Gruber's serial number list.