The wonderfully named Sportsman’s Emporium was a Mecca for Scottish outdoor men and women for nearly 100 years; from its inception in 1896 until the doors were finally closed in the 1980’s. Though there was an Edinburgh branch, the main store was in St Vincent’s Street, Glasgow, and among the vast array of sporting equipment there were skis, boots, bindings, poles, wax and clothing. Scottish skiers visited en masse as it was one of the few outdoor shops that stocked ski gear in Scotland. There have been very few actual ski manufacturers in the UK and shops like the Sportsman’s Emporium would import skis from wherever they could find them, mostly from Norway, Switzerland and Germany. We can’t find the manufacturer’s name on either of the skis or the bindings on the set we have here in the collection, but reckon they would have come from one of the above countries in the 1930’s, a time when there were no ski tows and ‘Kandahar’ style bindings enabled skiers to go cross country, up the hill and down the other side.