I am very excited to be able to announce that Headstamp Publishing's second book, "Thorneycroft to SA80" is now in stock and shipping! As the name suggests, this is a study of British bullpup firearms, written by the Keeper of Arms & Artillery and the British National Firearms Centre, Jonathan Fe...

I have done some videos previously with Tom Whiteman from Legacy Collectibles - mostly ones about his area of specialty; German WW2 handguns. Well, he has now published a reference book compiling more than 20 years of research on SS-contract Walther PP and PPK pistols. Thanks to records captured ...

John Moses Browning is, without argument, the greatest firearms designer in history. While we have had many brilliant designers who had their names forever connected to guns (Maxim, Luger, Kalashnikov...), Browning invented whole categories of firearms. Gorenstein's new book "The Guns of John Mos...

Henry Chan of 9 Hole Reviews was a big help to me throughout the writing of Pistols of the Warlords, helping me translate a variety of really interesting Chinese markings we found on various pistols. So when I decided I wanted to translate the title of the book into Chinese to embellish the back ...

Following up on his 2018 "The British Sniper: A Century of Evolution", Steve Houghton has now released a followup book on the L96A1 in particular: "The Green Meanie". This rifles was a paradigm shift for sniping rifles, and a tremendous success for the British military. It is also a quintessentia...

The Tokarev is a pistol that does not have much written about it in the world of firearms reference literature - largely because it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact that many of the. variations. became accessible to Western collectors and researchers. What we hav...

The most recent addition to the Vickers Guide series of books is SIG Sauer Volume 1. This is 460 pages covering SIG's handguns and submachine guns from it's very first contract (the Mannlicher 1894 blow-forward pistols) to the recently-adopted M17 and M18 US military handguns and SIG's other ongo...

"Into Helmand With the Walking Dead" is a newly released memoir of the war in Afghanistan, written by my friend Miles Vining (whom you may recognize from Silah Report, among other places online). It is an intimate look at one Marine's experience from enlisting right out of high school, going thro...

When Volume 1 of the Vickers Guide to the AR-15 sold out, Larry Vickers and James Rupley decided not to simply print more copies. Instead, they chose to go back to basics, and massively expand the book. The new Second Edition has 300 pages more photographs and content than the original book, comi...

Bruce Canfield's newly released book, "U.S. Small Arms of World War II", is a book that attempts to cover a huge amount of material from bayonets to mortars and recoilless rifles. Where most books of this type end up providing only a rather shallow view of a large number of subjects, what Canfiel...

Peter Dallhammer is a mechanical engineer who works for the Walther company, and has written an excellent book on firearms manufacture. If you were going to design a university program around the design and production of small arms, his "Textbook of Pistol Technology and Design: Production, Princ...

I'd heard some negative things about today's book before I picked up a copy, and I was happily surprised by its usefulness. The book is German Pistols and Holsters 1934/1945, by Major Robert D. Whittington III. It is a pretty straight-forward work, written to aid collectors and historians in unde...

This is an excellent book to start a firearms library with. It has a lot of great information for a very affordable cost - I found my copy for $3 at a gun show, but it can be bought on Amazon for not much more.

Today we're looking at three different books on the 1903 Springfield rifle. Which one is best for you? That depends on what you're looking for...

Swiss rifles offer a great place for a new collector to put together a set of rifles with mechanical and historical interest, that are in great condition and still available for reasonable prices. The Swiss used three main variations of the Schmidt-Rubin type rifle, and all can still be found tod...

The Volcanic repeating pistol was the first direct step along the development path of the lever-action rifle that became an icon of the American West. Introduced before the advent of modern brass-cased cartridges, the Volcanic was notable for both its repeating action and the self-contained ammun...

The book (pair of books, actually) we're looking at today is a bit less rigorous than our usual material, and more humanistic. It's a pair of books entitled Veteran Bring Backs and Veteran Bring Backs Volume II, by Edward Tinker. Both volumes are compilations of firearms (and a few other related ...

Gary Paul Johnston and Thomas Nelson's The World's Assault Rifles is always one of the first books we turn to for information on automatic rifles. At 1200+ pages, it's a huge tome and a massive amount of research went into it. Mr Nelson previously published two volumes on submachine guns and a bo...

James Paris Lee began designing and patenting firearms in 1862, but it was not until 1875 that any of his designs were put into limited manufacture. He would ultimately see four of his rifles adopted by the US military (M1879, M1883, M1885, M1895), plus a large royalty from the British government...

The Whitney Wolverine (aka Whitney, Lightning, or Hillson Imperial) was a very space-age looking .22 automatic pistol designed by Robert Hillberg in the 1950s. It made novel use of materials (aluminum castings) and many clever design subtleties, and was a remarkably good pistol. However, the comp...

The Sterling submachine gun is one of the better submachine guns ever built - a lot of throught and engineering work went into its design. It is light, compact, ergonomic, very durable and reliable, and uses one of the best magazines ever made for submachine guns. It may be a gun overlooked by a ...

The final chapter in our continuing Luger series is today's book, The Parabellum is Back! While Sturgess' three-volume encyclopedia covers the pistol through 1918 and Simson Lugers takes us through Weimar, that leaves a lot still to learn. Luger production continued in World War II, and afterward...

Today we have a book with a wider appeal than most, as it covers a broad range of different gun designs and has lots of good information for both the very technical collector and the casual pistol enthusiast. It's Gordon Bruce's new book, The Evolution of Military Automatic Pistols: Self-loading ...

In the 1880s, the Dutch decided that their single-shot Beaumont rifles were obsolete and needed replacement. They started a program to modify them with 4-round magazines, and simultaneously set about finding a more modern rifle to adopt. After trying with some difficulty to test out new designs (...