Mauser, Luger, Görtz ...

[mauro]

Dear Fellows,
Probably you remind that a few months ago I had the privilege of buying, from Mr. Reinhard Kornmayer, two original Georg Luger letters exchanged between George Luger and Paul Mauser in 1892, related to the “Mannlicher Gewehr” business.
The below letter from Mr. Kornmayer is summarizing the origin of these two G.L. letters.

A couple of months after this letter, Mr. Kornmayer gave to me the possibility to buy also the second letter to keep them together.

Mr. Kornmayer is mentioning two additional archives, the Görtz archive and the copy of the George Luger documentation from the Mauser family archive.

Mr. Kornmayer gave to me the possibility of buying the Görtz photographical archive, composed by 32 different folders.

This huge archive has been collected by Mr. Görtz over 30 years and it contains hundreds of original historical photos from WWI and WWII and professional-made pictures of Luger pistols, accessories, holsters and so on...

To each photo in the archive it is associated a hand-written comment from Mr. Görtz explaining the reason why the photo is interesting and merit to be added to the archive.

The total amount of documents is around 3000 photos plus the related explanation/note from Mr. Görtz.

The pictures related to the Luger pistols are all made professionally, mainly black and white.

It is evident the effort made by Mr. Görtz to create and maintain this archive.

Mr. Görtz used most of these photos and related information in his book “Die Pistole 08” and in articles written for several magazines.

In addition to this acquisition, Mr. Kornmayer allows me to do one additional copy of his Luger personal archive containing the original Luger documents collected during the researches made with Mr. Görtz and mentioned in the above letter.

This archive is composed by 8 folders containing a few thousands copies of the original George Luger and Paul Mauser letters and patents; plus all the letters exchanged between the Mauser and Luger lawyers when the dispute between Mauser and Luger started in 1897.

A couple of folders are dedicated to letters exchanged by Luger with Swiss representatives for the Parabellum.

In particular, this archive contains all the letters exchanged between Luger and Mauser concerning the “Mannlicher Gewehr” business from where the two original letters I have presented to you a few months ago are extracted.

It is definitely important for me have the possibility to associate to the two original Luger letters, the copies of all the others referring to the “Mannlicher Gewehr” business; to have a clear picture of the context.

People interested in the two original Luger letters can refer to my web site where several pages are dedicated to this topic.

(http://www.lugerlp08.com)

I really want to thank Mr. Kornmayer for the unique opportunity he gave to me for the acquisition of all these documents.

All my best,

Mauro