You must also realize that the shipping date books are hand written and sometimes very difficult to read. They were done by humans and humans are prone to making mistakes. S&W serial numbers are sometimes hard to read and it is always possible that numbers were recorded wrong.
The serial number charts in the printed books were all taken from research done by the S&W Historian, Roy Jinks. These are not computer records and are therefore not easily searched or tabulated. The serial number charts are merely an interpretation of those records and since S&W purposely skipped around within the groups of numbers available, groups of serial numbers can be missed. This is why you sometimes will find a gun with a number that seems to be outside of the reported range. It is not a fluke, it is merely from a group of guns not previously listed for that model.
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My .45 HE Target Model of 1955 #S 130961 was shipped in Jan 1959 according to Mr Jinks. You really can't tell a lot by serial numbers
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The other component that you must consider with serial numbers is that guns were sometimes loaned out to gun magazine writers or ammunition companies or sales people. These guns were not listed at that time in the shipping records because they were not sold and therefore did not represent income to the company. When those guns were returned, it could be days, weeks, months or even years before they found they way back to the vault and eventually shipped. This is why occasionally you will find a gun that according to the next lowest and higher serial numbers shipped should have shipped say in 1953 but is listed in the shipping record as 1959.
Guns that never found there way back to the company for shipment will often show up as OPEN on the records.
I have worked in the shipping record books at Roy Jink's office and believe me, some of the writing requires a magnifying glass to decipher and it's a wonder that Roy has not gone blind after all of these years pouring through those records.
