Displaying items by tag: firearms

Bonhams is set to auction a rare pair of Brescian flintlock holster pistols, circa 1660–70, on November 26. The pistols, which will be sold in the antique arms and armor sale in Knightsbridge, London, are estimated to sell for £60,000–80,000 ($97,000–130,000).

Pietro Manani, who is listed by Brescian firearms expert Nolfo di Carpegna as “one of the most active craftsmen of his time," made the pistols. The length of his working life is unknown, and some speculate that the thirty-eight known examples of Manani's work may be the work of a father-son duo.

The antiques dealer and collector Joseph Kindig Jr. never fired a shot with any of his hundreds of American rifles made around 1800. He was not a hunter; he was a vegetarian who did not like to kill anything. At his store in York, Pa., he would refuse to sell his gun inventory to buyers who seemed snobbish or ignorant. He believed that the firearms represented the first major American artistic innovation.

His guns came mainly from Pennsylvania workshops, where a single artisan made and assembled each one: the maple stocks, iron mechanisms and brass floral ornaments. Each workman’s product “contained something of his spirit and soul,” Mr. Kindig told an interviewer in the 1950s.