Larry Wilson was often more fiction than fact. A fraudster who would write what you wanted to hear regarding your revolver. The deeper your pockets, the more elaborate his description. Often, you can take what he has to say with a grain of salt.
38 DA TB with “ Factory Solid Silver Grips”!!
- Thread starter BMur
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Larry Wilson was often more fiction than fact. A fraudster who would write what you wanted to hear regarding your revolver. The deeper your pockets, the more elaborate his description. Often, you can take what he has to say with a grain of salt.
wordsmith
Member
Rock Island Auction refused to use the Wilson letter and it's 'documentation' when offering this gun in the Dec. 2015 auction. I was one of the reviewers / cataloguers, none of us were even remotely open to making the representations the other (previous) auctions had published. The words 'Tiffany Style Grips' in the lot title are absolutely in keeping with the numerous styles and types of silver work done by Tiffany & Co., and the shipment date and destination are, as noted in the description, an open possibility relative to the time of the Paris Expo. While not at all lit up by the gun, I did and still do love the grips. And, I remain in full agreement with the listing as published.
DC
DC
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In the jewelry trade, "silver trimmed" generally means that solid silver is used to "trim" something else. In the case of these grips, I'm guessing that they were made out of some sort of wood or bone (ebony?) and then trimmed with solid silver. The silver itself was probably hammered into sheets (probably 0.050" thick, more or less), cut, and then formed to the shapes that you see in the photo. If you cut the grip in cross-section, though, you would probably find that there's very little silver there. I'm guessing less than an ounce across both grip panels.
Mike
Mike
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I do my best to not disparage the work of other historians. There have been things that Wilson asserted that I didn't agree with, and I'm aware that some of the things he wrote later in his career may have been more fantasy than fact. But I also recognize that he published a huge body of work, and that a lot of his research was actually superb. The "truth," such as it is in history, isn't binary here, and each work needs to be taken on its own merit.
Wilson's books aren't usually the first ones that I turn to, but I do have some on my shelf and I don't hesitate to reach for them. Wilson's Beretta picture book is my "coffee table book," which I very much enjoy flipping through in my leisure time.
As for the Fisk murder weapon ... I'm not sure that ascertaining the exact weapon is all that historically significant, other than to a few collectors that will pay an exorbitant amount of money for it because of its notoriety. I have a single Colt House revolver in my collection mostly because it was the first Colt gun to be released after the Rollin White patent expired, and because it looks cool. I suspect the most famous thing that my gun did was to come into my possession, which is to say that it didn't do anything in the least bit famous. Sometimes history goes that way.
Mike
scooter123
Member
I suspect those aren't solid silver, my thinking is that they are Gutta Percha with large silver inlays.
Model19man
Member
I like the look of it but could not justify paying north of $10K for it. It looks more like a $5K interesting item to me. Even at that price there are other things I would rather have. But it ought to be worth something like that to the right collector.
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Agreed. The low end of the pre auction estimate was $14,000. North of 10k seems like too much for this one. But would you pay $7,000 for it? I would like to see it in person, before spending that much for it, but 5k is a no brainer. The reason why I toss out the number $7000 is that, in most occasions, the opening bid at an auction is 1/2 that of the low end estimate, so it is likely a $7000 bid would have taken it on that day. But it failed to garner even a $7000 bid. Trouble is, by the time you figure in buyer's premiums, sales tax, and shipping, a $7000 bid could end up costing you much closer to $9,000.
