Upper school visual arts teacher Art Tobias’s article was recently published in a gun collector magazine. Tobias’s article, entitled “The Root of the Matter,” appears in the December 2013 issue of “Man at Arms for the Gun Collector and Sword.”

The story discusses the cabin and Indian scene on Colt’s Model 1855 Sidehammer Revolver.

It is accompanied by a variety of images including several views of the scene engraved on the gun and some pictures of the gun itself.

After researching for a year, Tobias wrote the story in spring 2013 and sent it to the magazine in June.

Tobias was not notified by the publication that his story would be appearing in the next issue.

“They sent me four copies. It was a surprise to me,” Tobias said. “I assumed the magazine would publish [my article] sooner or later but I hadn’t heard from him since I sent it in. I went to my PO box and I saw two copies of the magazine so I realized he published me!”

While he was collecting information, Tobias requested help from a member of a gun history group in Santa Ana, a gun collector on the east coast and a journal in the Dakotas that was finally able to answer a central question in his research.

Although Tobias does not own the gun featured in the article, he has been collecting guns for more than a dozen years and owns about 12 guns.

The pictures in the article are of his friend’s Colt 1855 Sidehammer Revolver in addition to loaned images from an auction house in Illinois and a major gun writer, R.L. Wilson’s, publisher Blue Book Publishing.

The editor and owner of the magazine, Stuart Mowbray, already knew Tobias from emails and letters they had exchanged prior to Tobias sending in his article to be published.

“I was really excited because he put it before the fold, so it was the third major article in the issue,” Tobias said.