It made no sense to me that I could obtain three examples of the Haenel 28-R in 6 months. Hiller in his book says it's a "rare" pistol. I recently had a German collector approach me to buy a Repeater cause he was a Haenel collector and found them very hard to find over there. I have found three US companies with old printed ads selling Haenel air guns: Stoeger, Hudsons, and Johnson Smith & Co.

The last one was not known by me until this week. I found an advertisement for the Haenel 28-R in their 1936 Catalog.

http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...psvbyabz55.jpg

Just this morning on line I found a online copy of the entire Johnson Smith and Co. 1929 Catalog. I paged through it and found the same advertisement. They ran it for at least 7 years.

http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u...psdbxqhek0.jpg

I did not know this but Johnson Smith & Co. was one of the most read catalogs of the Depression era. It was as many as 700 pages long containing a wide spectrum of entertaining products. Reading it became cheap popular entertainment for those troubled times.

Looking at the 1929 full catalog they only sold Haenel pellet air pistols. And the only high end pistol they sold was the repeater. They didn't sell the regular 28, only the 26.

You have to think that with this kind of exposure the US may have gotten more than it's share of Repeaters? It's also interesting to me that the Repeater appear as early as 1929 in a catalog?