Greg Jordan: John Wayne's guns: Collector's dreams impeded by wallet

Nov. 9—I have been a collector all my life. When I was a little kid, I started out with rocks. Then I graduated to little plastic dinosaurs.

As I grew older, my tastes shifted to assorted comics, then dinosaur books and finally Sherlock Holmes books. A few months ago, I added a real treasure to that collection. It was an anthology of West Virginia ghost stories featuring a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in West Virginia. Holmes and his faithful friend and biographer Dr. Watson visit the United States to address a mysterious forged copy of the Declaration of Independence. After settling that case, Holmes and Watson get an urgent message from a West Virginian pleading for help.

Spooky art, spooky statutes, diecast World War II tanks and aircraft, horror anthologies and World War II histories round out my collections along with knives and a small group of tarantulas I'm raising. Naturally, there are items l'd love to collect, but they're way outside my finances.

Editor Samantha Perry showed me an auction website this week that fired those unattainable dreams. Well, if I never win the Mega-Millions jackpot, they're unattainable.

A company called Richmond Auctions will be auctioning off some collectable guns made in honor of the late actor John Wayne. The Duke. Special edition revolvers and rifles owned by Wayne's son Patrick will become available to the public.

I saw the link for bidding now, and I knew down in my gut that I couldn't afford an opening bid, never mind dream of actually winning that auction. Years ago I made the winning bid for some art at a science fiction convention, but that sum was pocket change compared to what I'd have to cough up for a firearm made specifically to honor John Wayne. Collectors often have to throttle back their wishes when they know that the prices will be too high.

For instance, I started collecting diecast tank models years ago after I visited the AAF Tank Museum in Danville, Va. Last time I checked, I heard the museum will be closing, but no date had been set. When I visited it years ago, I saw tanks I had seen only in books. For instance, there was a German Panzer IV, a mainstay of the German Army during World War II. I even saw a Russian T-34 tank, which was another World War II vehicle, and came away surprised. It was so small; in fact, I've seen bigger RVs.

I had a chance to speak with the curator. There were a lot of Soviet artifacts such as uniforms, weapons and medals. During this conversation, he gave me some good advice for anybody collecting Soviet relics from the Cold War era. Copies of USSR gear tend to be better looking than the originals. Reproductions and outright frauds are banes of any collector. Forgery is one of the world's oldest professions. I understand archaeologists have found fake Egyptian relics that devious merchants sold to Roman collectors.

Well, I wanted my own tank museum after visiting that museum, but collecting real tanks — making full-sized fakes would be a challenge — is more than a little expensive. That museum acquired its Panzer IV after trading some other vehicles for it; somehow, that tank had ended up in Syria after World War II. I know I couldn't have afforded the shipping cost. Instead of real tanks, I have model tanks I can fit on a shelf or inside a curio cabinet. I have a variety of World War II fighters for my museum on a shelf, too.

Like many other collectors, I'll have to be satisfied browsing the auction catalog of John Wayne commemorative firearms and dream of what I would do if I won the lottery and had the cash necessary to set up my own museum.

Greg Jordan is senior reporter for the Daily Telegraph. Contact him at gjordan@bdtonline.com.

Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com