Dear Fellows,
I have noticed that the Swiss Luger pistol sn 01 in the Dr. Sturgess collection will be available at the next Julia auction.
I guess I have interesting information for the winner of this rare pistol.
I have in the Paul Mauser archive a part of the Glass Plate archive from the V-abt department in Mauser.
We already discussed that Paul Mauser introduced this early photographic techniques to take pics of the most important firearms produced but also of some crucial documents.
Below you can see some samples of different negative glass plate’s configuration.
We can say that they use the glass plate negatives as a sort of “configuration control” methods to keep trace of the models and techniques applied. For example there are also glass plates of test target results of key pistols and so on…
The point is that I have found in the collection the original glass plates negative of the Swiss Luger Pistol sn 01 soon in the auction.
I don’t think that Georg Luger passed to Paul these glass plates because they hate each other
but most probably they followed Mr. August Weiss in 1930 when the production line was moved from Berlin to Oberndorf. This is an interesting point because means that also DWM used this photographic techniques but it seems that no glass plates survived from DWM making the ones found in Mauser very rare and interesting.
I will be happy to scan these glass plates and pass to the winner a DVD with the high quality positives; I guess it will be interesting associating to the pistol the photos taken when the pistol has been produced…
Most of these glass plates negatives will be used in the next book Gerben and I we are writing therefore the information will be available in the near future...
Cheers,
Mauro