Sometime in 1990, I was in London wandering around by myself and I decided to pay Holland & Holland a visit. The store is incredible and while I was looking around, a Limey in a 3-piece suit asked if he could help me with anything, I chuckled a little and said: "No thanks, I'm just here to gawk." He reached over to a rack, grabbed what looked like a large bore double rifle, handed it to my and said: "have a look." I looked at the incredible firearm in my hands, and discovered it was a 32 bore sxs scatter-gun, priced at reasonable £32,000.00 - the exchange rate was ~ 2:1 at that time. Since I was the only "customer" in the store, he proceeded to lead me all around showing me all manner of Holland & Holland firearms and he allowed me to handle each of them. All of them were truly incredibly firearms - many of which were north of £100,000.00. What struck me the most, other that the craftsmanship, was just how well all of the guns balanced. H&H has ergonomics down pat, that's for damn sure. I ended up spending almost 2 hours there and he was full of information and answered all of my questions - which were many. It was truly an experience to remember.
Unfortunately, I was lacking the funds to take one home to TX.
Thanks. That's a fascinating place. I was in there one time, just to look. No one else was there except a gentleman who worked there. He asked if I wished to see anything in particular, and I didn't so he brought out a really superb side by side 410 or 28 gauge shotgun, I don't remember which. It was $42,000 as I recall and was the lightest, best handling shotgun I have ever held. Absolutely superb.
Nice to be reminded of that.
One other sort-of-gun store experience was when I was driving across country and stopped outside of Tulsa in Claremore to see the hotel that J.M. Davis had. He had guns in glass display cases in the lobby. He said we- I had a friend with me- could go upstairs and look and he had rooms of that 4 or 5 story hotel filled with guns. One room would be the Winchester lever gun room, another would be Remington, etc, etc. There were machine guns on the walls upstairs. He had two or three Walker Colt pistols. I saw two but I think he said he had three. He's gone now--this was 50 years ago- and his collection is in the hands of the state and some are on display at a nice museum. (
https://www.thegunmuseum.com/).
Now that it's been mentioned it might have been the 32 bore In Holland and Holland. It's been a long time and maybe it was that the price was 42,00 pounds. Out of my budget for sure.
