Silver Baskethilt Sword for comment

[Jim McDougall]

Brilliant Neil!!!! Thats some super sluething, thank you.

It is so intriguing to look into the 'golden age' of arms collecting, when valuable arms and armor were considered art and became part of amazing collections whose documentation formed the corpus of material for their study.

As you note, these early catalogs and references are exceedingly rare as they typically had short runs in publishing, so understandably are expensive in the rare cases they are offered.

While most of the material has been placed in subsequent works on the various types of items in accord with the topic, it is amazing to actually hold and peruse these old references, sort of a visit into time with the old sages of arms
There is NOTHING like the scent of old books!