In the autumn of 1946, hunting in British Columbia, John Nosler put a well-placed shot from his .300 H&H into a mud-caked moose and it stayed on its feet. The problem was the bullet. The jacketed bullets of the day came two ways: the military type, closed at the nose and open at the base, penetrated but often passed through the animal without opening; the soft point opened a wide channel, but sometimes broke into fragments that no longer had the weight to get through bone and muscle.

The following year he tried a bullet with two cores separated by a partition: the front one to expand, the rear one to keep pushing. That autumn he and his friend Clarence Purdie each dropped a moose with a single shot. In 1948 he founded the Nosler Partition Bullet Company in Ashland, Oregon, to sell it. The company is named after the bullet, not the other way round.

The dates that came later are the ones read on the boxes today: 1958, the move to Bend; 1970, impact extrusion for the Partition; 1972, the Solid Base; 1984, the Ballistic Tip, with its polymer tip colour-coded by calibre; 1997, the Combined Technology alliance with Winchester, from which the Ballistic Silvertip emerged; 2003, the AccuBond and the Custom Competition; 2007, the lead-free E-Tip; 2013, the AccuBond Long Range; 2016, the RDF. The house returned to family hands in 1988 and became Nosler, Inc. in 1990.

Of what crosses customs to get here, the bulk is bullets for handloading. That, together with the ready-prepared brass and the manual, is what explains why this house sits on so many Spanish reloading benches.