u/RoseAndScroll

Watch the full feature: https://doublegunjournal.substack.com/p/fabbri

Watch the full feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-badillini-engraved-fabbri-in-4

Full feature: https://doublegunjournal.substack.com/p/fabbri

In 1972 Milius was in Frank Pachmayr's office looking at a cased Holland & Holland over-under at $5,500. Pachmayr waved it off, handed him a case-colored Fabbri at $2,500, and told him it was the best gun in the world, and that he'd know, since he built guns himself and couldn't build one like it.

Milius bought the Fabbri. He still has it. He says he'll trade a Fabbri but he has never sold one.

Then there's 438, the one he calls the Grim Reaper. He tells it that late in a shoot-off, with the light going, a bird broke for the fence and the gun tracked it and fired twice before he'd made the decision himself.

His essay from our Summer 1998 issue is up now. It's less a review than an argument about what a maker produces once cost and schedule stop being factors, and it runs through Schwarzenegger's line about the wolf at the top of the hill, a Caesar maxim Tullio works by, and an alloy engineered on the assumption that three thousand years is a reasonable service life.

Watch the full feature: https://doublegunjournal.substack.com/p/fabbri

The full feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/the-tombstone-trio

Full Feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/the-tombstone-trio

Fabbri's barrel steel was formulated to last three thousand years, and flawless blocks of it were rejected because the maker didn't like the way they cut. Tullio Fabbri walked the Las Vegas Safari Show with no booth, no catalogue, not even a name tag, and the orders came to him anyway.

Milius wrote about Fabbri for the Journal in 1998. He traded off or sold nearly every fine gun he ever owned, but he never sells a Fabbri. His favorites are set aside for the burning Viking ship off Malibu. There's also the day in 1972 when Frank Pachmayr handed a young filmmaker the best gun in the world and admitted he couldn't build one like it.

The full essay went up this morning: https://doublegunjournal.substack.com/p/tomorrow-fabbri?r=61utg1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Watch the full feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/the-tombstone-trio

A short film on the middle revolver of the Tombstone Trio, the set of three engraved Colt Single Action Armys I featured over the weekend. The barrel carries the gambler's real trade in gold script: FARO, with Bucking the Tiger beneath it.

Faro dominated much of nineteenth-century American commercial gambling. Two cards drawn each turn, a case keeper tracking every card, a copper token to reverse a bet. An honest bank held only a narrow edge, and honest banks were less common. Both Holliday and Wyatt Earp dealt the game, and Earp held an interest in it at the Oriental.

Full feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/the-tombstone-trio

Here's the detail that stopped me while we were putting together our Corbett feature with Ian Douglas.

In notes written after her brother's death, Maggie Corbett recorded an accident at Kaladhungi. The date is lost, either side of the Great War. Jim was following a tiger's prints across a river in fading light when he slipped on a wet rock. The rifle shot from his hand, the butt struck stone, and the piece discharged past his head. He walked home hiding a hand that had been furrowed open, his shoulder peppered.

Maggie called it Cordite up his arm. Douglas points out she was raised among black powder guns and reached for the vocabulary of her girlhood. His reconstruction: the rifle was the .275, most likely loaded with a 173-grain round-nosed bullet, probably nickel-jacketed, and what hit Corbett was the splash of that bullet off rock. Jacket fragments, lead, and stone. The likely mechanism was the three-position safety, carried at the intermediate position, where it could be jolted to fire by exactly that kind of impact.

We made a short film of the incident, and the full account is in A Life in Steel, written with Douglas from his research for Undiscovered Corbett: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/jim-corbetts-gun-cabinet

Corbett's account of the Chowgarh man-eater has been argued over for ninety years. He was easing down a nala with a clutch of nightjar eggs in his left hand when he stepped past a slab of rock and looked back into the tigress's face. The rifle was in his right hand, lying across his chest and pointing away from her. By his telling, he brought the muzzle through three-quarters of a circle, one-handed, slowly enough that the movement could not be seen, and killed her with one bullet through the heart. The eggs, he wrote that evening, were unbroken.

Ian Douglas, who spent decades researching Corbett for his new book Undiscovered Corbett, put the claim to the most direct test available: he re-enacted the movement with the actual rifle, at Rigby's in London.

Full Feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/jim-corbetts-gun-cabinet

Undiscovered Corbett: https://amzn.to/3TA2yt9

Ian Douglas's new book Undiscovered Corbett (Merlin Unwin) finally puts primary sources under the Corbett legend: Rigby's order ledgers, the surviving W.J. Jeffery day books (now held in Houston), and the private hunting journals of the Nawab Sultan Hussain of Barh, written in Persian script and translated from the Urdu.

Some of what comes out of them: Champawat (1907) was won with an unnamed .500 modified-Cordite double and, in the preliminary hunt, a black-powder Martini. The Rigby — Manton's order of 19 April 1905, three rifles at £39 6s, number 2516 — was purchased and presented afterward in recognition, with the plaque engraved to the wrong initials ("J. G." for a man named Edward James). And by Douglas's documented tally, the rifle that accounted for the most man-eaters wasn't the Rigby at all. It was his W.J. Jeffery .450/400 3-inch, serial 20176, probably built by Daniel Leonard & Sons in Birmingham and retailed through Jeffery.

The book also prints Corbett's own unpublished writing, private letters, and ninety photographs never published before. I leaned on it heavily for a long feature I just published on Corbett's complete battery, from the copper-wired muzzle-loader he carried at eight to the Webley .32 on his last Indian firearms licence.

Feature: https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/jim-corbetts-gun-cabinet
Book: amzn.to/3TA2yt9