Author: Irwin Greenstein

Beretta has quietly produced the 687 EELL Classic 20 Gauge to support an organization that provides college financial assistance for children of special operations personnel who have died or were severely wounded in combat.

I’m blessed with the professional opportunity to shoot fine shotguns costing upwards of $100,000 and more. Boss, Fabbri, Purdey, Holland & Holland, all exemplars of sporting guns that will pretty much spoil you for life. Inevitably, when discussing these rarified shooting experiences someone pipes up that there’s no difference between using their Caesar Guerini and a Holland & Holland Sporting Deluxe. Both over/unders go bang and knock things out of the air, is their general sentiment.

At first you notice the smoky figuring of the walnut stock and checkered butt that peek out from the leather scabbard on the saddle. The stock suggests a profile that’s straight English and in your mind details compile into a classic uplander from London or Birmingham. You’d be surprised to learn, though, that the shotgun is Spanish and bears the American name of Thomas Ferney & Co.

A silent auction to promote literacy gave us the occasion to quail hunt on a family farm with the affordable and gratefully light CZ Upland Ultralight Green over/under.

At 5.8 pounds, the sprightly 20-gauge was deeply appreciated on the unseasonably warm day walking Bethel Oaks Farm near the Florida-Georgia state line.

There were at least two Browning Superposeds in Ernest Hemingway’s life. One of them was a very early model that may have come indirectly from Val Browning, the son of John Browning, the genius who designed the gun. However, neither its serial number nor its fate are yet known. However, the second B25 − as the Superposed is still known in Europe − is a standard–grade 12-gauge field gun, Serial No. 19532, with double triggers and 28-inch barrels (both choked Full) with a ventilated rib. It was made in Belgium and sold to Master Mart, a retailer in Fremont, Nebraska, on 26 October 1949 for $195.20. After that, we don’t know how, when or where Ernest Hemingway acquired the gun, whether new or second-hand, or what he accomplished with it, but we know where it is today and how it got there.