Having been heavily into holster making and leather tooling in bygone years, I learned a little about the stuff. Given the choice, always stay with vegetable tanned leather. As for the rest of the processes, there are so many that you would not believe it. There is no standard method. All of them are extremely tedious, filthy, disgusting, and often dangerous. If I told you what they do, you would think I was making it up.
Now remember, much of the horrid toxic mess that often goes into that leather, to embalm it, stays there forever, or until such time as you burn it because you can no longer tolerate being in the same county with it.
When you put a valuable antique Luger into one of those, that is ultimate togetherness. You have no clue what may happen to the steel, even from relatively short term exposure. You are rolling the dice, buying one of these repro holsters made in some dirt floor third world hut by craftsmen who can sew with their bare feet.
Having said that, you might buy one where the leather was vegetable tanned according to a perfectly good, old time recipe that gives a wonderful product. But you just don't know. Unless you tanned it or you bought it from a reputable supplier who can tell you how it was tanned, you are rolling the dice.
Conventional wisdom is that you should never leave a handgun in any holster for a long period, or it will be damaged. This is not necessarily true. If the leather has been done correctly, a revolver with a nice polished blue finish can stay in it for decades without damage. I know that for a fact. BUT, who wants to gamble that your particular holster is one of these? Not me. So don't store them in any holster, and certainly not in one that smells like Al Bundy's socks.
And Ron Wood,
You brought back some memories.
I see that you have really researched this leather thing. You even knew about the tragic nauga extinction disaster of a few short years ago. I'm not sure if Al Gore covered that in his award winning film, "Liberal Brain Farts and Intestinal Leakage". He should have. Only a few close friends are aware that, anticipating that the South American Nauga Infant Respiratory Seizure Syndrome (NIRSS) outbreak might lead to just such a thing, as it eventually did, I had imported one of the last wild breeding pairs of naugas from Chile back in the 1960s, where an uninfected few had survived in the High Andes. I had them penned in my back yard outside Washington, and didn't realize what energetic little diggers they were, with those big three-toed paddle feet. Well, they got out under the fence one night, and before dawn they had torn up the neighbor's entire one acre vegetable garden. He woke up, heard noise, saw vague shapes, and hosed 'em down with his 11-87 (Montgomery County cops never did catch him). When the smoke cleared, I had to pay up for the damage and dragged my poor pets home. Since I had to pay for the mess anyway, I also hauled some of the ruined vegetables home in a wheelbarrow. So coincidentally, I had everything necessary to vegetable tan two nauga hides, but there were so many buckshot holes that I could only get a couple square yards, barely enough for a few motorcycle seats, a wallet, and a couple golf club covers. I gave up on my nauga breeding program and switched to buying leather from Tandy. Then they went belly up, too. But I hear they are back in business, after doubling and quadrupling prices, of course.
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