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Book Review: Vickers Guide, Kalashnikov Volume 1
Available direct: https://www.vickersguide.com/books
I am proud to announce the newest book in the Vickers Guide series: Kalashnikov (Volume 1)! Cowritten by Larry Vickers, Rob Stott, and myself, this is a beautiful exhibition of 7.62x39mm AK rifles (smallbore AKs and other types will be cover...
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Book Review: Experiment and Trial
Experiment and Trial, by Mathieu Willemsen, is a catalogue of the 218 guns in the collection of the Dutch School of Musketry, which existed from 1855 until 1933. It includes a large number of very unusual prototypes, as the School was a testing ground for designs submitted by inventors hoping to ...
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Book Review - The P38 Pistol by Alexander Krutzek
If you have been looking for a comprehensive reference work on the P38 pistol but balked at paying $400 for the out-of-print three volumes by Warren Buxton, the solution is here. Newly available in English is "The P.38 Pistol" by Alexander Krutzek, with Dietrich Jonke and Orvel Reichert. Based in...
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Book Review - The Mac Man: Gordon B Ingram and His Submachine Guns
Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/2pVQ26w
Gordon Ingram served as an infantryman during World War Two, and decided to get into the gunmaking business after the war. He though there was a market for a submachine gun for police and military forces, and to that end designed the very Thompson-es...
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Book Review - Smith & Wesson Model 76 SMG by Frank Iannamico
Frank Iannamico's new book on the Smith & Wesson Model 76 submachine gun is in fact a book about much more than just the Model 76. It begins with several sections on earlier S&W 9mm carbines, like the 1940 "Light Rifle" and 1945 SMG. These sections taken alone are the most informative material on...
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Book Review: Serbian Army Weapons of Victory 1914-1918
Serbia, as one of the minor powers of World War One, if usually overlooked by history books - and is especially overlooked by firearms reference books. Want to know about the M1899/07 Mauser rifles? The Koka-Djuric M1880/07 conversion of single shot 10.15mm black powder rifles to magazine-fed 7x5...
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Book Review: Collector's Guide to the Savage 99 Rifle
Savage is an often under appreciated gun company, and the Savage Model 99 a rifle often not given the credit it is due. How many other firearms can claim to have been in active production by their original company for 103 years, with more than a million examples made? Well, for those who are inte...
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Book Review: The Makarov Pistol Part 2 (China, Bulgaria, Khyber Pass)
Henry Brown and Cameron White have released the second part of their work on the Makarov pistol, this time with additional assistance from Edwin Lowe. This second volume covers Chinese, Bulgarian, and craft-made ("Khyber Pass") versions of the Makarov. This volume is very similar to the first in ...
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Book Review: The Kalashnikov Encyclopaedia by Drs. Cor Roodhorst
All three volumes available worldwide from: http://www.kalashnikov-encyclopaedia.com
While there are several books available which showcase a decent number of different Kalashnikov variants (like Tokoi's work), and there are good reference works on the history and development of the system (Ia...
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Book Review: Italian Partisan Weapons in WWII
"Italian Partisan Weapons in WWII" was originally written and published in Italian by Gianluigi Usai, and recently (2016) translated into English by Ralph Riccio and published by Schiffer in the US. It was intended to fill the hole in histories of the Italian Resistance and partisans during WWII ...
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Book Review: The Suomi M/31 by Michael Heidler
Michael Heidler's bi-lingual (German and English) book on the Finnish Suomi m/31 submachine gun is a small but dense history of one of the best submachine guns of World War Two. It covers Aimo Lahti's background, the development of the submachine gun, its adoption by the Finnish Defense Forces, t...
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Book Review: Desert Sniper, by Ed Nash
"Desert Sniper" is an autobiographical account of Ed Nash's time fighting as a volunteer with Kurdish forces against ISIS in Syria in 2015 and 2016. Nash had been working as a volunteer with the Free Burma Rangers when he decided in 2015 that the growing list of ISIS atrocities demanded action. W...
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Book Review: Japanese Military Cartridge Handguns 1893-1945
What began as Harry Derby's "Hand Cannons of Imperial Japan" in 1981 was revised, expanded, and reprinted in collaboration with James Brown in 2003 as "Japanese Military Cartridge Handguns 1893-1945". That new edition is both the definitive guide to Japanese military handguns, but also a great e...
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Book Review: Communist Bloc Handguns by George Layman
There is not really a good reference book available on Communist Bloc pistols - or at least there wasn't until now. George Layman has just released this overview of Cold War handguns from the USSR, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavi...
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Book Review: Cold War Pistols of Czechoslovakia
Recently, we have been looking at a selection of books on Cold War eastern bloc pistols - and James D. Brown's "Cold War Pistols of Czechoslovakia" is the best of them. While its scope is specifically on Czechoslovakian pistols, it provides a wealthy of information for the collector, histories, a...
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Book Review: Col Chinn's (Free) 5-Volume Opus on Machine Guns
George Chinn's 5-volume opus machine gun-icus is a massive and extremely valuable reference work on the development of machine guns, as well as aircraft machine guns and aircraft cannon. It also includes and entire volume on the actual technical design of self-loading firearms systems, including ...
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Book Review: The Modele 1866 Chassepot
Until now, there has really been nothing substantial and scholarly printed on the Chassepot needle-fire rifle in English - but now that has changed, thanks to Guy & Leonard A-R-West. Their just-released book on the system covers everything from the development (including several competing systems...
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Book Review: AK47 - The Grim Reaper (Second Edition)
The expanded second edition of Frank Iannamico's "AK47: The Grim Reaper" is a hefty 1100-page tome which tackles the ambition goal of being a single reference for all things Kalashnikov. Ot begins with a section on Soviet development of the AK rifle starting at the Type 1 and proceeding through ...
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Book Review: Rifles of the Snow
Today's book is really more of a pamphlet than a proper book, but it still serves well given its purpose. It is Rifles of the Snow by Doug Bowser and Powers Dunaway, and it is an introduction and basic handbook of Finnish military rifles - specifically Mosin-Nagants. While Finland used a wide var...
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Book Review: VIS Radom, by William York
Today we're looking at VIS Radom: A Study and Photographic Album of Poland's Finest Pistol, by William J. York. The Radom is not a as well known as other pistols of the era (like the 1911, Browning High-Power, or Walther P38), but is an excellent gun and has a devoted following. It is also one of...
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Book Review: Automatwaffen II
It's a bit of a different book review today - since we've been looking at Swiss arms all week (and there's a really unique one coming up tomorrow), we needed to find a book on the Swiss. What we have is one of 9 or 10 volumes on Swiss military arms, both issued and experimental. This volume (the ...
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Forgotten Weapons Library: Mexican Military Arms, by James Hughes
James Hughes' Mexican Military Arms is a pretty good book on a subject not often written about. It covers all the rifles used by the Mexican Army (both locally designed and purchased elsewhere) from the Spencer repeater up to the adoption of the M1 Garand. It is a bit limited in coverage, though,...