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,...

"Arming the Dragon" by Dolf Goldsmith is now available and shipping:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/purchase/arming-the-dragon-by-dolf-l-goldsmith

One of the most common rifles in Warlord-era China was the Mauser Model 98 short rifle. Various Chinese armies bought large numbers of them from...

Today I'm taking FN's new High Power out to the range for some first shots. I'm curious to see if it really is more comfortable to shoot than the original High Power, and if it can digest a wide variety of ammunition (something the originals were not great at)...

The MSBS Grot is Poland's current military service rifle, and has gone through several iterations in the many years of its development that led to its current 2nd generation form. It is best known in the US as a rifle designed to be interchangeable between standard and bullpup layout, although th...

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...

It seems like everyone is making a copy of the Browning High Power these days, and FN themselves have jumped into the arena as well. What FN is making isn't just a clone of the original pistol, though - they have built something largely new, taking inspiration and design cues from the original BH...

The best book on the MG34 and MG42 is by Folke Myrvang, published by Collector Grade - but it's out of print and really expensive. So what are the other options? Well, both Osprey and Schiffer Military have much smaller books on the MG34 and MG42. So I bought copies of both to see how they compar...

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...

John Keene is the NFA specialist for the Morphy Auction Company, and I spent a week filming particularly cool guns there recently. They have more than 80 machine guns in this upcoming auction (May 18th), and I couldn't cover nearly all of them. I thought it would be interesting to some of you to ...

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...

Lance Lysiuk has very recently published a new book on the SMLE, "A Collector's View: The SMLE - Rifle, Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield 1903 - 1989". A self-published work specifically on the SMLE (and not the Long Lees before nor the No4 series after), this book is written as a collector's guide. A...

The third volume of an eventual 4-volume set of books on Sharps rifles has been released, and this one focuses on the Models 1874, 1875, and 1877 target rifles and variations. This volume was written primarily by Roy Market, Ron Paxton, and Edward Marron Jr, but the series is really a collaborati...

"The Bear Went Over the Mountain" is really not a single book; it is a compilation of forty-odd short vignettes of Soviet combat actions from their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The accounts were taken and translated from a volume printed by the Frunze Combined Arms Academy in Moscow. T...

This book is a bit of an odd one...written by Klaus-Peter König and Martin Hugo in 1987, it is a translation from German or a book intended for the German sport shooting market. It attempts to be a catalog of 9mm Parabellum pistols, but this is impossible because of the number of new designs that...

Rather than review a specific book today, I thought it might be useful to go through my library and pick out a set of 5 general-purpose books that would make a good foundation for a firearms reference library. Specifically, books that cover a lot of ground, have at least a decent amount of detail...