I hesitate to sum up the present discussion with a short post.... A true gun buyer, collector, accumulator... of interesting guns...who owns twenty or fifty Parkers, does not feed his collection with money earned solely at his day job...[and]...the owner of twenty or fifty Parkers has bought and sold many times that many marginal guns on the "buy low, sell high" principle...[using]...profits from these transactions to finance the twenty or fifty Parkers that are probably still in his gun room.... Collectors are hucksters at heart and generally complete their deals with play money.
Bill: I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing your "summing up" of your rather narrow view of the manner of collecting fine (and not so fine) guns, which you believe is the mode. I see things through a different lens.
I admired my friend's Parkers in the mid-1970s and bought a Trojan 20-bore for $900 (not chump change then, but 25% of what I had just paid for a new International Scout 4x4). A week later a VH 16-bore came to my attention in a newspaper ad and I paid $650. Both guns were bought in 1974 with proceeds of my day job. And never since in 35 years of Parker collecting and shooting has there ever been any connection between my buying an incremental gun and selling another.
This does not mean that all "true" Parker collectors (other than Eightbore) adhere to my template, however, the greater number of people I know who collect fine shotguns are not self-declared wheeler-dealers who are trying to build an estate with profits from buying low and selling high "marginal" shotguns. When Jim Julia sold 129 of Jim Parker's Parkers in October 2005, I think it's fair to say that those guns had been acquired with funds derived from sources other than wheeling and dealing. Many of the Parkers in Julia's October 6, 2009 sale have named owners who are obviously not dealers or traders. I will have a table in the PGCA tent at the Vintage Cup this weekend and I am hard pressed to think of any others of the "usual suspects" who will share the tent at this remote and expensive venue who buy and sell to feed their Parker appetite. My point being that one size does not fit all.
Over the past 35 years I have owned about 30 Parkers, and have sold most of them for various reasons; for example, I sold all but one of my two-trigger shooters after I lost my right eye and had to learn how to shoot as a lefty (my left trigger finger can't sign checks or pull two triggers effectively). My NIB unfired Trojan 12-bore was strictly a play on perfection and I got tired of storing it, along with a certain 98% VHE 20-bore Skeet and a 95% VH--I wasn't going to shoot them; I could possess them forever because they were pictured in my books and articles, and it was someone else's turn. In other words, not all motivation to buy and sell is of the wheeler-dealer mentality. Circumstances change, interests change, and motivation can change independent of financial considerations and/or the blind pursuit of the next deal.
I will have five guns on my table at Easton MD, not to wheel and deal or feather my nest, but because it's time for others to own and enjoy that which has given me pleasure over the years. All five are seminal examples of American gun making excellence, A Parker lifter s/n 0895 (ca.1870); an Ethan Allen ca.1868; a Remington Whitmore s/n 190 ca.1873; a Philadelphia Fox s/n 262 (which is a dead ringer for a contemporary Parker VH); and "Tuck's" AAH pictured on the cover of my latest book. In fact, all but the Phil. Fox are pictured in my books and articles so I can, thus, "possess" them forever...and if I spot a Parker that interests me at the Vintage Cup...who knows? But whatever the case, there is a total disconnect, for me, between acquiring and dis-acquiring, and I believe that this is true for most of my Parker friends...or at least I hope so. After all, if liquidity in the stock and bond markets depended on everyone wearing their "I Got More Than That In IT!" T-shirts and making their "play money" nut on "buy-low-sell-high profits" then nothing would happen. EDM
