Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Huge disappointment with 1920/26

I bet you the cost wouldn't be as astronomical as you might expect and Savage might be able to get a grant if they set things up right. But first I would have to ask if a digitizing project would even make a dent in their budget as they seem to have had a pretty good run over the last 20-years. I think its more an issues of no concern than it is of no money. Everybody is interested in history but unfortunately the buck stops right there. Nobody ever wants to do anything about it if it comes with a cost.

That is where they should be IMO.

What does Cody charge for a letter?

Thought it was a lot higher.

There may come a time where another Savage historian is approved by Savage and gets the ledgers. Price could even drop then (who knows?).

I'd hesitate before pushing for them to be shipped off somewhere that they will never come back from.

The fee for Winchester, Marlin and L.C. Smith factory letters is $70.00.

The LCSCA either has the Smith records or a digital copy of them (I suspect the latter), and if a member of the Association wants a letter it costs only $50 from the club's "record keeper", Jim Studdienbeck.. ($75 for a non-member.)

That brings to mind a question that has surfaced in the pea soup of my brain from time to time. Every major make of vintage gun has its followers who have formed a formal Association and maintain cool websites- why hasn't an official Savage Collector's Association ever been formed? This forum is great, and the Facebook bunch is a nice bunch of fellas, but both are just informal "granfalloons" (A word made up by Kurt Vonnegut, meaning a group with a common interest but no other formal ties- a bunch of drunks from all walks of life crowding a bar and all drinking the same brand of vodka would be a granfalloon). A formal organization, with a charter (and secret handshakes maybe) would be the natural recipient of cast off ephemeralla (ie: records, old sales literature, executive's arrest warrants, etc.), not to mention being a repository of all knowledge of things Savage. It would be something for the Ages, something that would live on after us.

Its a great idea and a fantastic way to memorialize all things Savage, or at least 99 if that was the intended mission. I assume that such associations maintain websites with their own specialized forums. Great idea!

I honestly doubt Savage cares enough one way or another to invest much of anything into the archives. To them it's probably a giant yawn. Mega-corporations concern themselves with making mega-money, and I doubt a bunch of tightwad collectors complaining about the cost of $65 historical letters is high on their list a GAF's. Someone would be doing them a favor to write them a check for the ledgers and handle them privately. Win/win.

Who's gunna step up?

A collectors association would probably be able to raise the scratch. A viable alternative to that idea would simply be for Savage to make a long term loan of the records to the NRA museum. I'm sure the museum would love to get them in their collection and I'm double sure they would provide the needed preservation.

Yep, the majority of the Winchester factory records wound up fueling the factory furnaces in the 1950’s. The rationale was freeing up space and saving money on fuel. The Winchester people can only shake their heads now.
In this day and age irreplaceable archives/records need to be in the hands of a responsible steward before they are gone forever.

I'm sure the lawyers had some say in Winchesters deliberate destruction of their records.