OK boys and girls, cinch up your knickers, here goes Ron Wood on a flight of fantasy again.
Mike Reese was the Luger Editor for Guns and Ammo in the mid 1970â??s. He started a feature in August 1973 that showcased a different variation of Luger each month. In February of 1974 his topic was the .45 Luger. The photo he used in this article was Sid Abermanâ??s #2. When Mike consolidated these feature articles into â??Luger Tipsâ? in 1976, he chose to substitute the photo that Pete Ebbink is questioning now. Where did he get this photo? The answer is found in Scott Meadowsâ?? book â??U.S. Military Automatic Pistols, 1894-1920â? on page 383, and in J. Howard Matthews outstanding work â??Firearms Identification, Volume II page 387. The photo is from the archives of the Ordnance Department. You can see the caption under the following picture I took from Meadowsâ?? book â??Ordnance Department photograph of the .45 caliber Luger tested in 1907â?. Matthews has a similar caption.
I have taken the Aberman Luger and the Ordnance photo and placed them side-by-side. Granted, the angles of the photos are very slightly different and I have had to do a bit of scaling to make them appear about the same size, but neither of these factors are enough to significantly alter the grip angle and perspective.
Ball's back in play, where do we go from here?