Agreed Dean
and for people who do research for PP it would be a boon.

Sounds like a good idea. All YOU have to do is process about 160 books with say 150 pages to a book and maybe 25 or 30 entries to a page to generate the cross reference. But, don't expect any computer help, these books are hand written in classic long hand script. Its hard for a person to decipher the writing, so I would not expect any scanner to have OCR capability that could help.

Not to say it couldn't be done but it would take many, many man hours at, I suspect, a considerable expense. It could be quite an accomplishment for someone but not one I would want to sit at a computer table to attempt.

Robin- I'll get working on it. As soon as I retire.

I will volunteer to do it, as I have many times before. I'll be waiting for the call. 301-972-0740 My home is about 90 miles south of Chuck's.

Why should the order numbers be indexed? Nothing would be gained by doing so except in the case where an order number found in the old order book number 5 can also be matched up with an order number in stock book number 1 and I showed an example in my first reply on this thread. Let me emphasize this is a very rare case because most of the order numbers in stock book 1 are not there.

Some order numbers are found on the barrel flats of hammer guns. This is the same order number found on the original order in the new order books. The new order books are indexed by serial number and when viewed, it also shows the order number. Parker based everything on the serial number, not order number. Nothing would be gained by searching by the order number.

Bishop's Hardware was not assigned their own order number so that every order they placed would have the same order number.

Actually there is a bit of information about the gun in those notes. Most of them show the grade, gauge, and barrel length...
ie: 1 10 32 . Also, some have length of pull, drop at comb and heel and how the chokes were requested.
There is some useful info there.

I get the tone of Robin's post, but his arithmetic is skewed. His reply is to a post that suggests digitizing the customer base. The customer base is 26 pages for each order book, with very few entries under Q, Z, X, and Z. It is not neccesary to record each gun, only one entry for each customer. This would be a very interesting addition to our data.

I agree Bill - it would help in determining instances a gun was sent back for additional work and if a particular customer (not a retailer) had purchased other Parker guns.






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Sorry Bill, I guess I didn't understand what was being digitized. I didn't know there were anything called a "customer base" in each book. I have never looked at an entire book, I have only seen an individual page from a book. I assumed the intent was to digitize the entire content of each book and then take that to build a relational database to search for whatever desired data was of interest.

Just goes to prove the adage about the first three letters of the word assume and how it might reflect on the person making an assumption.

Robin, when you open an order book, the first page will be customers whose names begin with A, whether it is zero A's or a whole page full. It goes on for 26 pages. To the right of each customer's name are the page numbers where that customer's orders appear. Not every page entry is for a gun order. Some entire order books are only repairs but still have the customer index. The digitizing of the customer pages would be done in a similar fashion that the Serialization Book was done. Customer name, order book number, page number are the only entries neccesary. Just those three entries, with no mention of a gun, would give the researcher something to use to look up that customer's purchases. If a company like Abercrombie and Fitch or Tryon has multiple purchases on a page, the page need only be listed once in the researcher's data.