The Breda Model 30 was the standard Italian light machine gun of World War II, and is a serious contender for “worst machine gun ever”. Yes, given the choice we would prefer to have a Chauchat (which really wasn’t as bad as people today generally think).

The Breda 30 suffered from all manner o...

Written by Josef Mötz and‎ Joschi Schuy, "Vom Ursprung der Selbstladepistole" (Origins of the Automatic Pistol) is an absolute gold mine of information on early manually operated and self loading pistols. It is limited to Austro-Hungarian designs and is available only in German, but even so it re...

Get your copy here: https://www.vickersguide.com

Larry Vickers and James Rupley have expanded the Vickers Guide series of coffee table books to World War Two Germany, to look at one of the periods of the most rapid small arms development in world history. And, in light of full disclosure, they...

It may look like an airport bookshop thriller, but don't let the cover fool you - Dr. Matthew Ford's "Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation" is a seriously rigorous academic study of the military small arms adoption process. The process is examined through the lens o...

Get your copy here: https://www.vickersguide.com

Larry Vickers and James Rupley have followed their first volume of AR-15s with a second one - as we should have expected when the first one was title "Volume I". Where the first volume covered the early development of the AR by Armalite and Colt...

https://www.vickersguide.com

I don't normally have much interest in coffee-table books, and the Vickers Guide: AR-15 would definitely be considered a coffee-table book. That said, it is substantially different than most such books, and much more worthy of a place in a firearms reference library....

"The UZI Submachine Gun: Examined" is a newly published book this year by David Gaboury - long time owner and operator of the uzitalk.com forum. Until now there has not really been any substantive written reference material on the Uzi, but Gaboury has certainly changed that!

The Uzi has not r...

Ian Skennerton is a leading authority on British rifles, having written extensively on Sniders, Martinis, Enfields, and more. This specific book, "The Lee Enfield" is the most recent iteration of his compendium of Lee-Enfield information, printed in 2007 (previous versions were "The Lee Enfield S...

Since we are in the midst of an ongoing video series looking at the development of the SA80 weapons family, I figured this would be a good time to mention the single best source of written information on that program: Steve Raw's book "The Last Enfield: SA80 The Reluctant Rifle". Published in 200...

Written in 1997, Timothy Mullin's "Testing the War Weapons" sets out to provide a practical users guide to a wide variety of military rifles and light machine guns from the late 1800s to the present day. Unfortunately, the book suffers for lack of good editing, and comes out rather dry and repeti...

Until recently, there has been very little published information on South African and Rhodesian firearms outside of a few sporadic magazine articles - but that is no longer the case! The Pretoria Arms and Ammunition Association has recently published the epic results of a 17-person, 8.5 year long...

"The Schmeisser Myth: German Submachine Guns Through Two World Wars" is a newly published history of SMG development from the Villar Perosa and MP18 through the MP38 and MP40, written by Martin Helebrant. Given that it is published by Collector Grade, it should be no surprise that it is an excell...

"Pistolas y Subfusiles de la República Producción de Guerra" is a new 580-page reference book about the pistols and submachine guns made in the Republican zone during the Spanish Civil War. It is written by three authors - Josep Mª Abad, Manuel Estirado, and Francisco Fuentes - and printed exclus...

From the Authors: http://www.lugerlp08.com
From Amazon: http://amzn.to/2te3O3F

The new book on Paul Mauser from Mauro Baudino and Gerben van Vlimmeren is an excellent exploration through the labyrinthine corners of the Mauser Archives. Written with an assumption that the audience will already...

Here in the United States, the Italian Vetterli is overwhelmingly found in the 1870/87/15 guise, and considered unsafe to shoot. However, this is simply the final transformation of a rifle which saw substantial military service and deserves more respect than the often-haggard examples here usuall...

If I had to choose just one firearms book to keep (for some inexplicable reason), Edward Ezell's "Handguns of the World" would be on the short list of books to consider. It is a remarkable combination of history and mechanics, or the most common and the most obscure, and extensive detail at a ba...

Deadly Beauties is a photographic collection of rare and collectible German pistols from 1871 through 1945, split into two volumes. The written sections are quite brief, and the photography is beautiful. More importantly, the photography was well directed by the authors, focusing on the details o...

Get a copy for yourself here: http://www.sipublicaties.nl/

"Captured Arms (Beutewaffen)" by Guus de Vries is Volume 9 of the Propaganda Photo Series by SI Publicaties out of the Netherlands. I really like the whole series, as they do a very good job of combining really interesting original pho...

The BESAL is a simplified redesign of the Bren light machine gun, developed by a BSA employee named Faulkner. The design of the gun was motivated by the disastrous retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940, where they abandoned a huge amount of weaponry and war material, including most of ...

The Swiss were the first country to adopt a self-loading service pistol; the Luger in 1900. They would keep those in service clear through World War 2, at which point they began seriously looking for a more economical and more modern replacement. During the 1940s, a number of experimental designs...

In 1940, Switzerland began a series of trials to replace their Luger service pistols with something equally high quality, but more economical. They had squeezed as much simplification out of the Luger as they could in 1929, and by this time the guns just needed to be replaced. The first 1940 tria...

Another pair of transitional Bergmann transitional prototypes today, this time ones that sit between the 1896 and 1897 designs (No2/3/4 and No5). One of these is basically an 1896 frame with an 1897 upper assembly and locking system, while the other is basically an 1896 action with an 1897 grip f...

Today we have a pair of interesting transitional Bergman factory prototypes which fall between the early No.1 / 1894 design and the 1896 No2/3/4 commercial production guns. These are both in the white, and show features from the designs both before and after. An interesting look inside the develo...

The Bergmann #5 was the first pistol in the Bergmann line to have a locked breech action, taken from one of Schmeisser's machine gun patents. This model was introduced in 1897 using a more powerful cartridge than any of the previous Bergmanns, with the intention of finding military contracts. The...