Glass, a long-time firearms consultant and the authority on the Colt Walker, died earlier this year. Glass followed his father, Herb Glass Sr., a legend in the firearms collecting field, into the business in 1975 and carried on the business after the senior Glass’s death in 2007. He served as an honorary curator for the West Point Museum and served on the advisory board for The Gun Report.
“It was only natural, I guess, that I would be fascinated by old guns since we had a shop full of them,” he recounted in an interview with Rock Island Auction Company. He had plenty of advice for people willing to listen.
He reminded people that good, collectable firearms have always involved spending money. He didn’t accept the argument about getting a Colt Walker – again his specialty – for $2,000 in 1940.
“When I was a kid, good guns cost money,” he said. “It is money relative to today. I ask, do you know how much $2,000 was in 1940? You need an inflation calculator to figure that out. Good guns cost money.”
He thought collecting shouldn’t be looked at as a business but a hobby, and appreciated collectors like Lampe whose gun collection partnered copious amounts of research with his firearms.
“The ones who are students are the most fun,” Glass said in that interview. “If you’re buying something because it is going to go up 8-10 percent a year, and that is your sole interest that to me is pretty boring. The people who have done that that I’ve known over many years never stay with it.”
Looking back, Glass fondly recalled a simple gun that he enjoyed from his collection, a Remington Zig-Zag derringer in its original cardboard box. That gun went on to be in Lampe’s collection.
“I owned that for a number of years. That was special to me,” he said. “That is far from the most important gun in the collection. It was just a favorite.”
In 2020, he examined A Company No. 50 Colt Walker and found it to be “a genuine Colt Walker in fine `untouched’ condition.”
“It is a remarkable occurrence that this very original and “untouched” Walker revolver with original holster came directly from a prominent pioneer Texas family that had retained it since the Mexican War,” Glass wrote in the Feb. 18, 2020 letter.“ The revolver sold for $431,250.
In recalling the legacy of Herb Glass Jr. and his father, Rock Island Auction Company President Kevin Hogan noted, the many famous guns the pair handled, owned by Theodore Roosevelt, guns that landed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Gene Autry Museum.
“Every great dealer and collector in this field was bolstered by a great mentor. Herb Jr. definitely had that, but clearly he also cut his own path,” Hogan wrote in remembrance of Glass in the catalog for the May 2-4 Premier Auction. “Herb Glass Jr. will always be the last word on perhaps the most significant of all 19th century American made firearms: the Colt Walker. We will always remember Herb for his spectacular voice and unwavering honesty. The amount of knowledge lost with Herb’s passing is profound, but what a legacy he leaves behind. Cheers to one of the best to ever do it.”
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