I started collecting lugers in 1989. I was talking to my brother in California and he mentioned that he had bought an artillery luger and he really liked the way it shot. I thought that I might enjoy shooting one while deer hunting. Just to kill some tree stumps and not to actually hunt with. So I bought a beat up 1917 artillery with a good bore.
Shortly thereafter we discovered that my mother had advanced cancer and not long to live. I was close to my mother and I got down on myself. The guy who sold me my first Luger invited me to go with him the the Ohio Gun Collectors Association show (OGCA) at the IX Center. I thought that it would be good for me to get away for a day just to get away from the tension of waiting for my mother to die. I walked into the OGCA show and was stunned to see all these beautiful Lugers all over the place. OH WOW!
The people who I rode with and I would meet at lunch time and they would talk about all the good buys of P08's there were at the show. I thought that they would get mad if I bought one of the guns that they talked about and they had the FFL. So I decided to buy a 1914 Erfurt artillery that had light freckling rust all over it but no pits. It had a good bore but I was too stupid to buy the holster and stock that came with it. I told the dealer that I only wanted the gun for $1000 and $1400 seemed like a lot of money for a full rig. Over time, I had a set of all the artilleries and decided to start getting navy Lugers. I have a passion for the model 1914 navy Lugers but Lugers with the strawed parts look cool with the strawing. I now have about 40 Lugers. While I have a couple of Kreighoff's and WW2 Lugers, most of my collecting is in the 1900 to 1920 time frame with the majority of those being artilleries and navies.
The center piece of my collecting is a recently purchased 1893 DWM Borchardt with original bluing and a great holster, stock and check piece which created quite a stir at a recent OGCA show as well as on the forum. My 15 minutes of glory.
I have gotten to the point now where I am looking more for the matching stocks and magazines for the guns that I have. I have a lot of duplicates so I might start trading off some of my Lugers for something else that would improve my collection. I have three nice chamber dated 1914 DWM artilleries (two with matching mags) and Doug Smith of FGS thinks I am trying to corner the market. Actually, circumstances worked out that they came available to me at decent prices that I could not pass up.
Big Norm
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