Order Book #5
 

Does any body know who bought the original order book #5 on E-bay, I thought all the original books were at Remington with the exception of a few in private hands, I understand it sold at the buy it now price of 3500.00, What a find this was , tells me that there are more books in private hands that we thought, Gary

I did not see that listing. Do you have an item number?

Interesting to see one come up for sale.

I found it. Ebay item number 291769470588.

I thought the covers of the order books were differen looking than that. The binding is gone which may have had the Parker name on it originally.

Wow...that's unusual. Also...whoever sold it probably sold himself short by not advertising it. Probably coulda generated some real interest in it.

Have we as an organization ever tried to buy the books Delgregos have. They have two or three and some degree of the late Remington records/info. If the one on Ebay went for $3500, perhaps an offer of $10,000 for their stuff might shake them loose. I believe our organization has well over a $100,000 in available cash, at least it did some years ago. What better use of our funds is available?

Brian, when I enter the item number on Ebay, nothing comes up.

You check the checkbox for sold listings on the left and it will show up

Thanks Eric. Found it.

A dozen Ebay searches related to Parker does not beat the early bird. Looks like listing lasted just short of 8 hours.

I personally feel a good route to take for someone who actually cared about the organization and forwarding the interests of it would donate it and then take the write-off for whatever value they want. Make up the money on the back end and help out the PGCA.

Order books are little good to an individual.

Heck, at least donate or offer to sell copies of it to the PGCA.

I actually wonder if ti was a copy. It doesn't look like it, but maybe. I assume the PGCA does not have #5...?

The Ron Kirby letter it references also is interesting as it implies that at least one PGCA member knew about it at one point in time.

I'm no tax attorney, but unless the PGCA is a 501(c3) organization, I don't believe any tax writeoff is available.

But, as I remind folks donating to organizations to which I belong - "It's fully tax deductible until you are audited"

wish some of us had seen this book earlier...good luck to the buyer....charlie

John, The PGCA is indeed a 501(c3) organization.

Oops. My mistake. Has anyone ever calculated what percentage (if any) is deductible?

Just to be clear. The PGCA is a 501 (c) 7. The Parker Gun Foundation is a 501 (c) 3. Thanks, John Davis

Delgrego is not the only one with Parker books! wish we could somehow bring all these books back into the PGCA or at least let us copy them for our records, Gary

Like Gary, I do not understand why people will not allow the PGCA to make copies of these books as they did with the Remington books. I understand why they want to keep the originals but why not allow a copy?

I would like to hear Chuck Bishop weigh in on this book.
Who do we know in Matthews, North Carolina who would have this book?
And who is a***b (592)?

Let me try and clarify (or confuse you more)
 

First, let me define the order books I'm talking about. The one just sold on e-bay I'll call "Old Order Book #5" because there is also a later Order Book #5 which I'll call "New Order Book #5.

The PGCA has a xerox copy of the book, I have it in my possession. Yes it would be nice for the PGCA to own it but only because they would have the original book. The xerox copy is an exact match and very readable. So if we have old order book #5, there should be old order books 1 thru 4 and possibly 6 thru whatever until the "new order books" 1 thru 100 start. Unfortunately old order book #5 does not contain serial numbers, only order numbers so there is no way to use that old order book #5 to do research letters on. In the new order books, when the order was entered, it was assigned an order number but not a serial number. The serial number was added at a later date when the parts were assigned a serial number. The serial number was then sent to the office to be entered in the order. This was not done in the old order book #5, therefore no serial numbers can be found.

Now let's add in stock book #1. The stock books go sequentially by serial number however there is a column for order numbers to be entered. In the real early stock books it's rare to find a order number along with the serial number. In the later stock books, you will usually find the order number unless it's been faded out over time. I went through stock book # 1 trying to find a order number that would match a order number in old order book # 5 and I found 2. The first order number didn't agree with what's in old order book #5. One book showed it as a 10ga. and the other book as a 12 ga. The other one matched. Both books showed it as an 11ga. with 30" Damascus barrels, and the stock configuration matched! The S/N was 2353. Look at order # 2297 in the attached picture

It would be very difficult and time consuming to try and match the old order book #5 with stock book #1 so that a research letter could be written using the info found in old order book # 5

The last order number found on old order book #5 was 2393 and the first order number found in the new order book # 1 was #1 so they didn't carry over the old order numbers to the new order book # 1.

I'm posting a picture of S/N 2353 (order number 2297.

Hope this helps to clarify.

just a question Chuck - on some hammer guns - the serial number is on the side of the barrel lug

and a number i have heard referred to as the order number is on the flats

is this the same order number is these order books?

This is one of those funny things ... I have no trouble understanding why a person would not let the PGCA make a copy (of course it appears PGCA already has a copy but nonetheless.....)


The PGCA has the majority of the order books, and will not allow anyone else, right or wrong, to have a copy. So it doesn't follow that someone 'should' allow the PGCA to have a copy of whatever book they have. It's a two way street. Especially when the PGCA makes money from the information contained therein.

Book#5
 

Noticed a couple entries from the book listing McGee of Kansas City... attached is a Pic of McGee
from late 1800`s

Trap3

Case in point - All sorts of good stuff happens when there is a free exchange of information

Old Order Book #5
 

Chuck, thank you for taking time to explain this piece of the early Parker records puzzle. FV

Yes Rick, if you see a number that resembles a serial number on the barrel flats, that is the order number and would match the order book order number.

ok - then- if we include that number in the search request-

would it give us any more data?

or just more work for you? :corn:

I don't think we have the records digitized or indexed by order number. But we should. And a scanner that can read numbers would do that?
All our stuff should be cross indexed.
So if you wanted to know every gun sold to Bishops Hardware, you could.

It could be done George. In the front of each order book is an alphabetized listing of all the customers in that book. Looking at the pages shown on the eBay auction order book there are mostly items such as shells, quantity, and cleaning rods, jags, etc., with only a dollar amount shown for the gun ordered, no serial number or description of the gun at all. My point is that it would be really nice to have this other information shown in a research letter.






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I've heard a story as to why the Delgrego Family won't release their record books. If anybody wants to hear it, feel free to drop a PM.

Destry

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.