No Collection should be without one!
I was too dazed to take it right there and then. The owner wouldn't have parted with it immediately anyway. Two weeks later I returned and bought it. When I phoned to check wether he was willing to sell it now, and at what price, he started with the words 'I know it's rare and valuable'. For the faint of heart I've put the astronomic price I finally ended up paying for the stand on a separate page.
The whole stand comes apart into four metal pieces and two card pieces for the logo. The actual rack is six stories high, but fortunately the whole thing is extensible, and didn't take up half as much space in my car as I had thought.
The puzzle of the height, which I remembered to be different from what I could see in the Bowler advertisement, was easilly solved: The stand can be used either fully extended, using both pieces of aluminium tubing, or two-thirds extended using only the top piece of the tubing.
When fully extended the stand takes a staggering 232 boxes, a bit too much for my collection I'm afraid. In its more modest form it 'only' takes 156, which still is a stiff target to set.
I've never heard other collectors talk about them owning such a stand. Are any other specimens known? Were they used outside Europe at all? Ricardo Haddad assures me they were NOT used in Brazil. And last but not least, was there a preceding stand on which the boxes hung down from their punchholes, or were they only hung on wallracks? If so, are any of these around in collections? I'd love to know.
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