Re: The price of fakery :-(
Kyrie, you are 100% correct. You did the right thing. Nice going. But there really is not anything you can do to protect the poor buyer. I mentioned before that I was at the OGCA show recently and a guy was trying to sell an artillery luger that he had engraved a naval unit marking on the rear strap. He had deliberatly had it engraved there so that he could up the price of a nice looking artillery to (I think $2200 w/o matchimg mag). Everybody that I talked to that knew anything about lugers already knew what this guy had done. In a way, he was the talk of the show. We were all disgusted. A few told him off. But what he did was not illegal so we could do nothing to help stop some new guy from buying the gun. Plenty of people told me so that I could be aware of the fakery and I thank them.
What you did is the beauty of this forum. Older, more experienced collectors have to help new people who are coming in. But we have to be carful that we do it without scaring them off. Remember, we too made out 'mistakes'.
It comes to my pea sized brain that in two of the most popular luger books (Jan Stills and Gibson_ there was a discription of luger Kreighoff P codes with side inscription. In one of them they described the correct inscription and also showed a faked inscription. In the other book, there was a picture of a Ralph Shattuck P code with side inscription. Lo and behold Ralphs gun had a fake inscription. This is not to put down a great guy like Ralph because I do like him and his wife and respect his experience. It is only to illustrate that even good, knowlegable collectors make mistakes.
Big Norm
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