I initially started my website, Unblinkingeye.com, in 1999, when the World Wide Web was still relatively new. It was intended as a personal website for my poetry, photography, and intellectual and collecting interests, which included philosophy, psychology, photography, cameras, fountain pens, and books. The site went through an evolution, as I began to write about darkroom photography and historic photographic processes. Unblinking Eye became a resource for darkroom photographers and people working with historic and alternative processes. Digital photography was not on my radar until several years later.
Photography was my weekend hobby for thirty years, and I fully intended to do it full time when I retired. But the reality was that I quickly grew tired of darkroom work. It was okay when I only did it on the occasional weekend, but when I began to do it every day I started to dread spending hours in the dark.
The transition was gradual, but I began to collect pistols and revolvers, which had always interested me, and I began to write about them as soon as I had acquired some books and began to learn about the history and development of automatic pistols. I discovered that there was very little available on-line about many of the guns I was collecting and, since I already had a website, it made sense to begin writing about guns in the same way I had written about photography.
I made a number of friends in the collecting community in Texas, where I live, and at some point I began going to the big gun show in Tulsa, where I met David Rachwal, Leonardo Antaris, Bill Chase, and a number of other collectors and gun experts. I've been doing business with David Rachwal for nearly twenty years now, and we have come to like and respect each other. When he first suggested that he might want to buy my website, I wasn't interested in selling. But health problems, technical issues with creating the code for the website, and an offer to publish books if I would write them, made me rethink that. It helps that many of the guns I enjoy collecting and writing about are exactly the kind of guns that David sells through Handguns of the World. David has the background to appreciate what I have done with my Gun Pages, and there really isn't anyone else I would consider allowing to take over hosting my articles. In return, I have promised to try and keep them updated.
The format is going to look a bit different, but that cannot be helped. I hope the Unblinking Eye Gun Pages will continue to be a useful resource for collectors in the future.