Joe,

According to the seller, the estate was of a leather worker. I wouldn't expect a leather worker to have access to, or have retained documentation between Bo and Heiser relating to the Randall stamp. If I put myself in Bo's shoes, I'd much rather have my brand on the sheath as opposed to Heiser's. It could very well be that the last change of Heiser ownership (The Keyston Brothers) finally consented to a request that Bo had made for decades. It's also likely that Bo sent Heiser the stamp as opposed to sending Heiser a drawing of the stamp. In that case, Bo would have asked for the stamp back when he discontinued doing business with them.

When Gaddis started researching Bo's files for his book in 1985, there was almost 50 years of documentation that he had available to him to sort through. Despite the length of time he spent at the shop, he couldn't get to everything. If he missed the correspondence from Bo to Heiser regarding the stamp, IMO the chances that Gary or even Jason will at some time go back through those records to look for the correspondence that you need for definitive proof is pretty slim (If those records even excist now). We have to go with what we have.

With regard to distinguishing the differences between a Heiser sheath and a Johnson sheath with the Randall stamp: We can use the sheaths in the auction as the final product that Heiser produced for Bo. But what Johnson sheaths do we to use to compare? It doesn't make sense to use the horizontal logo sheaths as there has been a consensus that these came before the vertical, and the sheaths in this auction have both positions! From that one data point, one could "almost" say that any sheath with a brown button and a horizontal sheath was likely a Heiser. Since it seems that both Heiser and Johnson produced brown button sheaths with vertical logos, it follows that you can't use these for comparison either. Therefore, the best Johnson comparsion against these Heiser sheaths would be tight stitched roughback baby dot sheaths. Even this comparison wouldn't be 100% accurate as Johnson's quality naturally improved over time. As I said, this ain't going to be easy.