Our book today isn't particularly flashy or exciting, but it is a solid piece of research. It is Astra Automatic Pistols by Leonardo Antaris - and the subject is pretty self-explanatory. Antaris follows a simply and effective layout, with the book divided into chapters on each model of pistol (ma...

I ran across a mention of this book while trying to find some information on a 37mm Hotchkiss machine gun - and this book was the only reference I could find any mention of it in. Robert Mellichamp has taken on a pretty daunting task; documenting the history of the 37mm gun and ammunition from 18...

I recently got a copy of Tom Davis Jr's brand new book on the history of British use of the Thompson SMG. This is very much a history book rather than a technical book, and it is based on meticulously researched documents from the British national archives, right down to the hand-written notes sc...

I was looking through our reference library yesterday, and realized that we hadn't mentioned at Hatcher's Notebook before - which is a glaring oversight. Julian S. Hatcher (Captain Hatcher during WWI, and Major General Hatcher by WWII) was a presence in the US Ordnance Department for nearly 30 ye...

http://www.armorplatepress.com

Most of the books I look at are primarily text-based, and today I figured we should do something a little bit different. Armor Plate Press, run by Tom Laemlein, specializes in photographic studies of various weapons (and vehicular) topics. Today's book is The Yan...

I have been procrastinating the addition of a good book on the M1 Garand rifle into my own library, reading the various published material off of friends' shelves. Now I'm glad that I have put off the purchase, because hot off the presses is a new tome by Bruce Canfield, a 900-page encyclopedia o...

Ludwig Olsen's Mauser Bolt Rifles is one of the foundational reference books on the Mauser rifle, and deserves a place in the library of any bolt action rifle enthusiast. Olsen studies the rifle from its early single-shot, black powder beginnings through its ultimate expression as the Model 98, a...

Today we're looking at one of the most recent additions to the Collector Grade ensemble: Tim Mullin's MAGNUM: the S&W .357 Magnum Phenomenon. It's a very good history of one of American's iconic handguns.

Good news for everyone interested in collecting Italian military firearms (yes, both of you)! Ralph Riccio has just recently published a new book on Italian Small Arms of the First and Second World Wars. Until now, there have been very limited options for English-language books on Italian guns, a...

I picked up a copy of this book a couple years ago when Bin Shih first published it, but by the time I got around to doing a review it had sold out - so I didn't bother. Well, a seconds printing run has been made, so it seems that now would be a good time to take a closer look at it. There are ve...

I recently picked up a very nice looking Gewehr 88 from an online classified ad, and when it arrived I really didn't know what I had (I'm not an expert on older German bolt actions by any stretch of the imagination). So, I poked through our reference library for a suitable looking work to explain...

One of the characteristics that often leads me to be particularly interested in a given gun is a long and convoluted history. I really enjoy finding firearms that have found their way across the world and back. One entire category of rifles that did just that were the hundreds of thousands of rif...

"Military Rifles of Armies in Europe 1867-1886" by Paavo Raukko is a useful book, although one with some limitations. It is largely a photographic catalog of exactly what the title describes, specifically covering Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Great Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland,...

Jean Huon recently released a new two-volume set of books specifically on the MAS-36. I figured that rather than look at it along, it would be more useful to compare it to the other books available on the MAS-36. So, here's a comparison of the five different books I am aware of with major materia...

"Guns of the FBI" was written by retired FBI Special Agent Bill Vanderpool, who spent many years on the FBI Firearms Training Unit and has a perfect background to write a book on this subject. This is not really a typical reference book; it reads much more like a series of oral recollections. Tha...

Bas Martens and Guus de Vries are a pair of very knowledgable Dutch small arms researchers and collectors who published "The Dutch Luger (Parabellum) - A Complete History". As one might expect, it is a thorough and comprehensive history of Luger pistols in Dutch service. This includes the Dutch A...

"Rough Forged" is Col. Darrin Weaver's much-expanded book on the development of the German Gewehr 41 and Gewehr 43 self-loading rifles. His first book on the subject was "Hitler's Garand", published by Collector Grade in 2001. In 2019, he chose to self-publish a new two-volume book on the subject...

All purchasing options available here:
http://www.ak47catalog.com

I recommend the complete 14-volume set in electronic format:
https://www.lulu.com/shop/rob-stott/the-ak47-catalog-volume-1-14/ebook/product-2g8epy.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Rob Stott is an AK subject matter expert who has been produ...

"Kalashnikov - The Inside Story of the Designer and His Weapons" was originally publishing in Russia in 2009 (Mikhail Kalashnikov's 90th birthday). It was written by his daughter, Elena Kalashnikova, and aims to explain the basic design process behind all of Kalashnikov's small arms, from the ori...

Today we have another of the reprinted Collector Grade manuscripts; this time "A History of the Small Arms Made by the Sterling Armament Company: Excellence in Adversity". This was originally "The Guns of Dagenham" by Peter Laidler and David Howroyd. It now shows James Edmiston (former owner of S...

To order a copy, email the authors at [email protected] .

This very limited-print new book on Eugene Lefaucheux by Guillaume van Mastrigt and Arie Slingerland is an excellent reference on the Lefaucheux family, the business, and the guns themselves. Author van Mastrigt married into the ...

There are a number of older Collector Grade reference books that became outrageously expensive after going out of print, and Dolf Goldsmith's "Grand Old Lady of No Man's Land" about the Vickers MG is one of them. However, last year (2021) Dolf worked with Dan Shea at Chipotle Publishing (and cont...