Featured Rifles
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What Perfection Looks Like After 129 Years
Most surviving nineteenth-century Marlin rifles carry the accumulated evidence of their long lives. Blue that has thinned to grey. Case colors that have faded to smoky brown. Checkering worn smooth in the palm of the grip. Even the best-preserved examples usually show some evidence of the century-plus they have been in circulation. Then there are rifles like this one. Serial …
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The Canvas That Lasted One Year
Schoverling, Daly & Gales advertisement, Outing magazine, September 1891. The rifle illustrated is a first variation: side loading gate, half magazine, straight grip. The selling point in the copy is not accuracy or finish — it is that the side plate comes off with a thumb screw. Public domain. In September 1891, a New York sporting goods house named Schoverling, …
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After the Guns Fell Silent: A Factory Engraved Marlin Model 39
On November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent across Europe. For the Marlin Firearms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, the Armistice meant something else entirely: the end of a lucrative wartime machine gun contract — and the beginning of a corporate crisis that would reshape how the company built rifles. The New York Times, November 11, 1918. The end of…