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 Sterling) as a third coauthor.

In theory, having someone so close to the company could be a fantastic resource for writing an authoritative history of the company. Unfortunately, Edmiston had a clear and massive personal bias to the elements he has added to the book, and there was no third (well, fourth) party editor to tone him down or ensure objectivity. Frankly, Blake Stevens would never have published the book as it is currently written. During his Edmiston's stint as owner of Sterling, he would have the reader believe that every bit of adversity the company felt was entirely the work of a spiteful British government out to destroy the company. There may be a some truth to those claims - but Edmiston's writing is so obviously biased that one really can't make any judgement as to what the real truth is.

In addition, the book was created in the laziest possible manner. While the rights to the manuscript were purchased from the Stevens estate, there was no surviving original manuscript to provide to a printer. Instead, a copy of the original book was scanned on some sort of flatbed scanner, and the text then run through OCR text recognition software, and laid out with a minimum of editing (except to remove the distinctive Collector Grade two-column style). There are a bunch of OCR errors (like reference to the "SABO" rifle instead of "SA80") and all the images that extended into the gutters of the original book are cut off in the new version because the scanner could not properly capture them. In addition, all the images are a bit darker and blurrier than the original printing.

This could have been done a whole lot better. A professional or even hobbyist-level scanner could have gotten complete page images, or the source book could have been taken out of its binding to scan it properly. It is telling that nobody was willing to sacrifice the $500 value of an original copy of the book to make the reprint look reasonably good. In addition, even a half-hearted pass by an editor would have caught many of the OCR errors. But instead, it was done for a bare minimum cost.

All that being said, this new printing does include the original information from "The Guns of Dagenham", which is the best book on the Sterling SMG. As that book is long out of print and prohibitively expensive, buying a copy of "Sterling Armament Company" is the sensible option for anyone looking for information on the gun - just treat anything described during Edmiston's ownership with some skepticism. It is available for about $55 from Amazon:

https://amzn.to/3s5CnKz