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Von Lengerke and Detmold: by Ed Dittus
We, as collectors, often come across oddities, things we cannot account for or things there does not seem to be a whole lot of information about. I had bought a Mauser Model 1910 pistol with a Von Lengerke and Detmold (VL&D) engraving some time ago. I knew that they were an early NYC gun dealer but not much else. I came across a couple more similarly marked pistols and I started to wonder about the store itself. How big an entity was it? How many of these pistols were sold by them? I found that the data was not readily available so I determined to find out what I could. This paper is the result. As it turns out, the first importation and sale of these pistols in the USA (and perhaps outside of Germany) was through the agency of VL&D. I wrote about the Von Lengerke and Detmold marked Mauser pistols previously in the NAPCA journal (Dittus, Various dates). This article is a compilation of those articles, so all of the latest information is in one place. In essence, it is the story of the first days of the Model 1910 (henceforth m.1910) in the US. Background The first recorded sale of the m.1910 Mauser Pocket Pistol was to the Rottweil Powder factory on 15th of February 1911. This company tested Mauser products before they went on the market. The Rottweil Company was linked to Mauser via the ownership of DWM shares by Rottweil owner Max von Duttenhofer. Subsequent to this, VL&D became the first importer, retailer and wholesaler of the m.1910 Mauser pocket pistol in the USA. The Mauser archives show a shipment to VL&D of 50 m.1910 and 50 C96 pistols on June 12, 1911. Sales by VL&D commenced shortly afterwards with the first on July 13. The next sale of these pistols to VL&D occurred on July 31, 1911. This shipment was for 100 m.1910 pistols. There are no serial numbers associated with either shipment. The picture shows the entry for this very first shipment of m.1910 pistols to the USA.
According to the Mauser Archives, the sales directly to VL&D were as follows:
Did VL&D continue to import or did they purchase from another distributor after these 400? The Archives show that shortly after the last VL&D shipment, Hans Tauscher obtained numerous m .1910 pistols.
Where these pistols went is an open question. And, of course, in January, 1922, a contract between Mr. A.F. Stoeger and the Mauser management was signed. This contract stipulated that Stoeger would become the sole distributor for Mauser in the United States for one year. From 1922 onward, every USA dealer was supposed to acquire the m.1910 directly from Stoeger. Paradoxically, there is no mention of any engraved pistol being shipped to VL&D. I am grateful to Mauro Baudino of the Mauser Archive for the information contained here. II. About Von Lengerke and Detmold The retailer Von Lengerke and Detmold was founded in 1882 in New York City by Justus von Lengerke (1854-1929)1 and Ernst Detmold (1853-1929). The store (with it's companion in Chicago, Von Lengerke and Antoine) catered to an upscale clientele with quality offerings in fishing, hunting, camping and other outdoor pursuits. The enterprise was sold to Abercrombie and Fitch (A&F) in 1928. At the time, Abercrombie purchased a number of assets, among which was Griffin & Howe (G&H), the gunsmiths. Eventually G&H became independent and retained the sales records of the VL&D and A&F enterprises. These records provided a rich resource for the researcher of firearms sold during the early to mid parts of the last century. VL&D was noted for importing various European arms including Francotte shotguns and Mauser pistols, particularly the C96.
These particular weapons appear regularly on Internet gun trading sites. They are sometimes marked with the VL&D logo.
The Ledger Sadly, Griffin and Howe data from their site concerning Mauser products is not relevant to this conversation. Bob Beach, formerly Griffin and Howe archivist, examined these data and confirmed that they concerned long arms, not pistols. Therefore the only data that we have (currently) are:
These two sets of serials do not overlap. That is to say that no VL&D marked m.1910 pistol's serial appears in the ledger. This means that they were sold beyond the dates covered by the ledger. Bob Beach provided me with ledger records that concerned themselves with the earliest sales of the m.1910 pistol in this country. The information is on two sheets, a sample of which is reproduced below.
There are only two pages that are identified as specifically relating to the Mauser m.1910 pistol. Here I will paraphrase Mr. Beach's communication to me. The pages are in VL&D Book No. 2, pages 335 and 336. There are a total of three columns of serial numbers in the data with 46 serial numbers in each column for a total of 138 guns on page 335. Most serial numbers are followed (horizontally) by the disposition, type of sale and date of sale. The disposition may be a customer's name or the name of another gun dealer who would be buying for resale, or the indication of "Cash Sale". Before the enforcement of the Sullivan Law it was not required to record the name of the buyer if the payment was in cash. In fact, entering a customer's name may have been a "company policy" used when a buyer charged a purchase or did not immediately pay in full. A Critical Limitation and Solution A limitation with this analysis, and any that concerns the data in the Mauser archives, is that serial numbers are not associated with shipments, at least with the data examined herein. So we need to infer that the data in the VL&D ledger, in fact, reflects the contents of shipments of these pistols from Germany. We know two things: the dates and amounts of the shipments (from Mauser) and the fact that there was a receipt of pistols on July 7, 1911 by VL&D (as entered on the first column in the ledger). The simplest analysis is simply to examine the pattern of serials in the ledger.
This is highly supportive of the idea that the ledger contains pistols from two shipments that were separated in time. This is probably the clearest evidence for the existence of two distinct shipments. There is an entry, in the first column, showing that goods were received (or, perhaps, entered in the ledger) on 7/11/11 which corresponds reasonably well to a shipping date from Germany in mid June. At the top of the first column is an entry for Serial Number 29, a “Sample” which was sold for cash on 10/20/11.
If we assume (reasonably) that this was not part of the June shipment, then we can infer that the fifty entries that follow represent the initial commercial appearance of these pistols in the USA. The lowest serial is 3652, the highest (within these fifty) is 4036. The first 48 sales (by date) are all from the first 50 in the ledger. If one looks at the writing, it appears that the entry after serial 4036 was written at a different time, perhaps indicating entries for the next shipment. In summary, then, it seems likely that these first 50 entries in the ledger correspond to the first 50 pistols shipped from Germany as reflected in the records of the Mauser Archive.
Of the entire data set, the lowest serial (excepting the “Sample”) is 3652, the highest 6630. There is not a lot to be gleaned from examination of the serials per se. They are not sequential, though there are three runs of serials that have three numbers in a row or more. Clearly there was little concern at the manufacturer end to maintain some order in what was shipped. I suppose that this is not surprising inasmuch as the Mauser Archives do not associate serials with shipments. Each entry has a record of the disposition of the pistol in question as well as a date of the transaction. The pie chart shows where these pistols went.
It is interesting to note that 42% of sales were to other retailers, including VL&D's sister operation in Chicago, Von Lengerke and Antoine. These were fairly large retailers/wholesalers of the day. Savage is still in existence. Schoverling, Daly & Gales, through many iterations, survives as Charles Daly. National Sportsmen Assoc., too, still exists. All others, to the best of my knowledge, have gone the way of all flesh. The “Cash” component reflects the practice of not recording names if the customer paid in full (prior to the Sullivan Law in NYC). The entry of a name, presumably, occurred if there were extended terms of some sort. The complete serials data base is displayed in Appendix 1.
All individuals and companies mentioned in the ledger are found in Appendix 2. As of this writing, there is no record of shipment of VL&D marked pistols (see picture below) yet it is apparent that they were marked at the factory. If we examine the full set of serial numbers, with the VL&D marked pistol serial's interpolated, it appears that there are six distinct serial blocks. On examination, there appear to be four “clusters” of serial numbers of marked pistols. These are centered on serials 5482, 9592, 10025 and 14669. Note that these are statistical medians and may not match an actual serial number. Based on prior estimates of production, it is likely that all of these weapons were produced around 1912 or shortly before. Given that they do not appear in the Griffin & Howe data base (which only includes pistols sold through 1910), they must have been sold during 1911/1912 and have been part of the previously identified sales from Mauser. They might well have all been drawn from inventory at the Mauser plant, engraved, shipped, and delivered prior to around 1912. All of the foregoing accords well with the shipment data we have at hand. The fact that it is likely that the custom engraving was done by Mauser leads one to believe that the order was more substantial than 32 pistols. How many more? How many pistols were ultimately shipped to VL&D? Unknown at the moment. The minimum is 300. It is somewhat telling, I think, that no pistols marked with the VL&D logo appear to have been made later than around 1912 nor with a serial number greater than 15000. There are a number of possible explanations for this observation. The first is that the missing pistols are missing as the result of happenstance and, perhaps due to this note, collectors will “report in” so to speak, and we will find that VL&D did, in fact, import or otherwise obtain these pistols through their production run and that they were engraved, as noted, with the above-mentioned examples. A second possibility is that VL&D simply made one order, sold the pistols and never ordered more. Why? The only reason for this eventuality would be because the pistols were not popular. My small, and admittedly biased, sample of 19 pistols (aside from the VL&D marked examples) contains six with the “Germany” import mark. Such an incidence suggests a fairly robust acceptance in the US. The third, and most likely, alternative, in my humble opinion, is that VL&D imported a modest number of weapons, perhaps encouraged by Mauser offering to customize them with the VL&D logo, and then continued to purchase the m.1910 but without the inscription. If this is so, the VL&D marked pistols might well represent a “promotion” on the part of Mauser to boost sales with an important USA arms retailer. The paucity of examples then would simply represent the size of the promotion. This alternative would result in sales of pistols that would not be traceable to VL&D and could only be confirmed inferentially, if we were able to confirm large numbers of pistols being purchased by VL&D. While Mauser did not ship strictly consecutively numbered pistols in one shipment, they did assemble shipments that were largely consistent in the numbering of the guns included. That said, a reasonable hypothesis might be that we are looking for data for an additional four shipments to VL&D which consisted of at least some custom marked guns. Appendix 3 shows the date of sale by serial number. I include this for those that might find themselves in possession of one of these rare birds and would like to know more about it. Finally, the graph, below, depicts the sales as a histogram. The large peaks indicate sales to distributors. The sales are pretty flat by day of week.
III. VL&D Marked Mauser m.1910 Pistols
The VL&D marking on the Mauser m.1910 pistol is consistent across observed examples.
A close examination shows that it is under the bluing, indicating that it was done at the Mauser factory. Had it been done in the USA after delivery, the typical “halos” seen on Luger barrels, for example, would have been obvious. Shown here is the haloing around the serial number of a DWM 1914 Luger. Mauser is known to have custom engraved pistols for other retailers (Baudino, Personal Communication). The marking was identical across the 12 weapons examined.
Bender (1971) in his essential book Mauser Pocket Pistols, identifies a total of five m.1910 pistols marked with the VL&D logo (p.54). His observation was that few of these pistols were imported. In the 50+ years since Pender wrote those words a number of these pistols have surfaced and the data base now consists of 32 entries. The serial numbers can be found in Appendix I. Let me note that I am sure that all of these pistols exist with two exceptions: serials 9601 and 14669. These were reported but I cannot find any independent verification of them. If any reader has knowledge of either of these, please contact me. As I noted earlier, none of these serials appear in the sales records of VL&D. This indicates that they were sold after passage of the Sullivan Law in New York City that required retailers to turn over handgun sales records. This law took effect in 1911 suggesting that the marked guns in our data base were sold post 1910. In any event, the table, below, shows the number of cases by block of serials.
How many Mauser m.1910 pistols were sold to VL&D? Based on figures from the Mauser Archive, it appears that 150 pistols were shipped to VL&D during 1911 and 150 during 1912 for a total of 300 pistols that are likely to have the serial numbers included in our sample, given the date constraints identified above. This is an absolute minimum. Timing We know that Mauser came to an agreement with Stoeger making them the sole Mauser representative in the US from 1922 onwards. This specifically ended the relationship with VL&D. This being the case, it would make sense that no Mauser pistols manufactured after 1921 exist with VL&D markings. In fact, such a mark would be suspect. It is conceivable that VL&D bought Mauser pistols from Stoeger and then marked them with their logo but there is no data, neither examples nor documents, at hand that bear on this. It should be noted that the m.1910 pistol does indeed appear in the 1923 VL&D catalog. The best that we can say right now is that Mauser exported the 1910 pistol to VL&D between 1911 and 1921, inclusive. No imports occurred during the war years of 1917 and 1918 (at a minimum). IV. Wrap Up and Some Remaining Questions The questions that remain to be answered concern the total volume of Mauser m.1910 pistols sold thru VL&D and what, if any, identifying marks appeared upon them. I am hoping that eventually we will obtain more export numbers from the Mauser archive. I am also hoping that through this article, owners of VL&D marked pistols (I am primarily interested in the m.1910 but I will assemble a database for all pistols so marked.) will contact me at guns@myakka.com with the serial number, nature of the inscription and any other characteristics of note. Another question is the presence of unmarked examples within the serial range of the VL&D marked pistols (5000 to 15000). I would like to know about those pistols too. Finally (and I know I am pressing my luck) I would like to know of the existence of other retailer marked Mauser 1910 pistols. I have never come across one. Do they exist? Funny how these things work. I idly compared the serials of my personal m.1910 pistols to the data, not hoping for much, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but A MATCH!
Serial 3822. This is one of the first 50 Mauser m.1910 pistols imported into the USA. Naturally, I hoped that there might be some indication of a VL&D provenance on it but, sadly, nothing. This pistol was shipped in June of 1911 from Germany, entered into the VL&D inventory on July 11 of that year, and sold for cash on August 5, 1911 from the VL&D store at 318 Broadway in NYC.
How interesting to know, with some assurance, the peregrinations of a 110 year old object. It is the 29th Mauser 1910 pistol sold in the USA! If great Granddad Jacob were the purchaser, the story would be perfect!
VI. A VL&D Oddity An interesting thing that I observed with one of my new acquisitions is that the barrel appears to be phosphate coated, imparting a uniform gray color with sort of a matte finish.
The photo, below, shows it compared to a barrel with the typical blued finish.
It should be noted that this barrel shows no sign of after market refinishing. It is correctly numbered and is not ground or otherwise defaced, even slightly, as you might expect on an object that had had it's original finish removed. The fine stamping on the barrel also shows no sign of wear.
The pistol itself is in excellent condition with no sign that it was subject to refinishing. Pender (1970, p. 20) states that he does not believe Mauser Werke Parkerized any Model 1910 pattern pistols. So what is the story with this one? Perhaps an experiment from the factory sent to VL&D for evaluation? That sounds thin on the face of it. It has been suggested that somehow the barrel was differentially worn and an owner decided that Pakerizing it was a good idea. This makes some sense except for the fact that there is virtually no wear on the rest of the gun which you would expect to be the case with a badly worn barrel. I would very much like to hear any speculation on this latest conundrum. VII. A VL&D Documented Example It occurred to me that it might be of some interest to readers to see to see a VL&D Mauser C96 that was documented and reported on by Bob Beach of Griffin and Howe. The Gun The C96 in question was purchased by me some years ago from a dealer in Connecticut. This dealer had been collecting for some 40 years and when he informed me that he was thinning his personal collection I was eager for the opportunity to obtain examples. The pistol is in remarkably good condition with nary a scratch. The is a bit of wear on some of the high points consistent with being stored in the shoulder stock (which is serialized to the gun). Otherwise it is a fine, seemingly unused, example.
At the time, I did not particularly remark the VL&D stamp. Frankly, I was far more taken with the overall quality of the weapon. Now, however, I am intrigued with anything associated with VL&D so my interest has been renewed.
Shortly after I bought it, I found that some research could be done based on the VL&D records in the possession of Griffin and Howe. I contacted Bob Beach at that organization and retained him to look into the history of this particular C96.
The search was successful and I obtained copies of the ledger entry, the entire page actually, as well as a biographical work-up of the presumed purchaser. The entry is reproduced below and it can be seen that serial number 36031 was sold on Tuesday, September 29, 1903 from the VL&D premises at Broadway and Fifth Avenue in New York City Above the words “cash sale” there is the name, “Hutchison” and the word “Inventor”. At that time, individuals who paid in cash were generally not identified in the sales records but, seemingly, this Hutchison person was deemed worthy of note. At that time there was one Miller Reese Hutchison residing in Manhattan. In the 1910 Census his occupation is listed as “Inventor”. This individual was prolific, to say the least. He invented a hearing aid, the “Klaxon” automobile horn and a myriad of other things. He also created a cannon that was cited by the New York Times as potentially having the capability to: “Shoot 5 Tons 200 TO 300 Miles; Noiseless and Smokeless Weapon Has Muzzle Velocity Up to Five Miles a Second”. (New York Times, July 6, 1921, Page 1.) And, notably, he acted as Edison's Chief Engineer. Mr. Beach surmised that this was the “Inventor Hutchison” identified in the VL&D records—a not unreasonable conjecture.
And that is the story. There is some doubt about the attribution of the ownership of this weapon but I think that, on balance, we do know. Sadly, this service is no longer available from Griffin and Howe but, perhaps, if enough people request it, it might be reinstituted. References
The link to the Griffin and Howe data appears to have been removed. Thank you Bob Beach, researcher/archivist late of Griffin and Howe, has provided both data and valuable insights and has supported my inquiries with other information and good humor. Thank you Bob. I am indebted to Jon Speed and Mauro Baudino of the Mauser Archives for the information used in this paper. Visit and contribute to the Archive. http://www.paul-mauser-archive.com/ Mauser m.1910 Pistols Sold by VL&D (183 Total)
The first 151 in the table are the very first m.1910 imported and sold in the USA Individuals and Companies Mentioned in the Ledger
Appendix III First Mauser m.1910 Sales by Date
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Copyright 2025 by Ed Dittus. All rights reserved. |
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