Whipped Cream Difficulties

One of the problems joys of being a hoplobibliophile (as opposed to being a normal person, or even a normal book collector): you buy a book on a particular gun for some reason. It might be well put together and illustrated, or it might just be cheap. Whatever. Next thing you know…you’re wanting the gun to go with the book.

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The Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association Symposium has wrapped up.

I thought I’d stay over a day, relax, and kick around a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the places I’d like to kick around are closed on Sundays. But my loss is your gain. At least if you like gun books.

Pistol and Revolver Shooting by Walter F. Roper. The colophon lists it as Macmillan, 1945, and “First Printing”, but the “Olympic Edition” on the cover makes me wonder. Maybe first printing in this edition?

Mr. Roper was a prominent gun guy and gun experimenter: here’s a short article by John Taffin from Guns magazine about him. Purchased for $40 from a fellow collector at the Symposium.

I would have sworn great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training had reviewed this book on his blog. But if he did, I can’t find the review now.

Two of a perfect pair:

(Previously on Experiments of a Handgunner.)

I do have a copy of what I believe is Mr. Roper’s only other book, Smith and Wesson Hand Guns (with Roy McHenry) but I didn’t bring it on the road with me, and my copy is a reprint anyway.

Not exactly a gun book, but worth noting, in my humble opinion:

Smith and Wesson ties, tie bar, and tie pin. The tie bar and pin were purchased from one collector, the ties were purchased from another. I think they add that subtle touch of class when I’m wearing a suit. And I paid $25 for both ties (and another $10 for the bar and pin).

There was another very classy S&W tie in the auction on Saturday: sadly, it got bid beyond what I was willing to pay early, and I did not get a photo of it. You’ll have to trust me when I say this tie was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

Final totally unrelated side note: of course there’s an Internet Movie Firearms Database entry for “Johnny Dangerously”. Just in case you were wondering what the “.88 Magnum” actually was.

This is a little newer than I usually like to use, and I have not watched all of it yet. But I have linked to DeviantOllam before, I trust his content, and I don’t think he’s quite as popular in the gun community as hickok45 or Forgotten Weapons…

“Gun Storage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Gun Safes and Locks”.

From the wonderful folks at Wilson Combat: “Gun Guys Ep. 34 with Bill and Ken”. This time, they discuss “Elmer Keith, the .44 Magnum, and the .357”. I like this because it serves as a decent introduction to Elmer Keith (who I have touched on before) for those folks who are interested in guns, but came after the Elmer Keith era.

Jerry Miculek shoots his S&W 5906 Performance Center pistol (which was apparently an overrun from a contract with the Mexican Special Forces). Bonus: 9MM Incendiary ammo.

I watched this over the weekend (it popped up in my recommendations). Then I started looking at 5906 pistols on GunBroker…

Random acts of hoplobiblophilia:

Modern Gunsmithing by Clyde Baker. This is only “fair” at best, and yes, that is a crappy dust jacket. But this is one of those original Samworth/Small-Arms Technical Publishing Company editions that are hard to find. Ran across this at HPB, and paid what I think is about the same price as I would have paid on ABEBooks.

One of the odd things about Samworth’s books is that he didn’t use a printers key, so it’s hard to tell what printing one of his books is. You have to rely on internal clues, like the advertising pages in the back of the book: while the original copyright is 1933, the advertising page in the back is dated September 1950, and includes some SATPCO post-WWII books.

I’ve actually bought a fair number of used gun books over the past few months. I didn’t bother writing about them here because they were pretty much all semi-crappy copies of books that I bought for reading purposes, not really worthy of a blog entry.

This is something I ran across today at Half-Price Books that I found interesting for more than one reason.

Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa by Arthur H. Neumann. This is a reprint of the original 1898 edition, and volume 3 in the “Library of African Adventure” series from St. Martin’s Press. It has a little wear to the top and bottom of the dust jacket, but not too bad, and was purchased for about half of what “good” copies are going for on Amazon.

The other reason I found this interesting: you know who edited the “Library of African Adventure” series?

No, not that guy: he had his own series. The “Library of African Adventure” was edited by…noted SF writer Mike Resnick. Which is no great shock, as Resnick wrote extensively about Africa: it was simply an unexpected find.

Now I want to find the other volumes, especially since I’ve completed my Capstick set.

There is also something called “Resnick’s Library of African Adventure” that comes up when you search Amazon. I’m not 100% sure it is the same series – I suspect it is, but the bibliographical information on Amazon is scant, and the covers seem…less subdued.

How do you know when you’ve got a problem with bibliophilia?

One clue is when you start buying bibliographies.

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Half-Price Books had another coupon sale last week (before everything went to heck in a handbasket), and I managed to hit most of the sale days. (I missed Monday and Thursday, for reasons.)

On the non-gun book front, I picked up mostly small beer: a copy of Laura Shapiro’s What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories for $8.49 plus tax. I know it sounds awfully feminist, but I’m interested in food history and food anthropology, and I’ve enjoyed Shapiro’s other books.

My other non-gun book purchase was the three volume non-abridged (I’m pretty sure) Modern Library edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in the ugly brown covers) which I got on Sunday using a 50% off coupon: originally $40 for the set, so $20 plus tax. It seems to be in at least good, if not very good, condition, and I probably could have gotten it for about that price plus shipping through Amazon’s used market, but this was just easier. (Yes, I could also have downloaded it for free from Project Gutenberg: indeed, I actually have. But I’ve found it hard to read the PG edition, and it was worth $20 to me to have a printed copy.)

And what of gun books? Well, I did find a few of those…

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I made it down to the South Lamar Half-Price Books yesterday for the first time in a while. Good gun books have been scarce on the ground, but I found this:

Sixgun Cartridges & Loads by Elmer Keith. You can get reprint editions on Amazon fairly easily, but this is (as far as I can tell) an original Samworth/Small-Arms Technical Publishing Company first printing from 1936. Amazon lists one of these for $45.85+shipping in “acceptable” condition. I’d probably put this at “acceptable” condition, too: it has some jacket wear, and there’s underlining and writing throughout.

I paid $50+tax for this one, which may have been a little high (prices on ABE Books for this edition seem to be all over the place), but it has character. And I didn’t have a coupon, alas.

On the other hand, I did (through a series of work events) fall into some Amazon funny money, which I used to check off the last Timothy J. Mullin book on my want list:

Serious Smith & Wessons the N- and X-Frame Revolvers. Look for the smiling face of Archduke Ferdinand Elmer Keith on every copy!

I already had the other two Mullin S&W books (Magnum: The S&W .357 Magnum Phenomenon and The K-Frame Revolver: and I also have a copy of Letters from Elmer Keith: A Half Century of Advice on Guns, Ammo, Handloading, Hunting, and Other Pursuits) and I’ve had this one in hand for about 90 minutes now.

But it looks like there’s a lot of fun stuff in it. I’m kind of a sucker for N-frames to begin with, but:

• I had no idea there was a run of 3″ .45 ACP guns for Lew Horton. Want.
• I had heard about the John Ross Performance Center .500 Magnum, but literally only within the past week: Mullin devotes a considerable amount of space to it. (For the people who aren’t as much into Smiths as I am: imagine a .500 Magnum X-frame, but with a 5″ barrel. Sort of a larger, heavier, but still packable and shootable variant of the .44 Magnum.) S&W makes a 3.5″ stainless version (which looks absurd to me), a 4″ stainless version (maybe not so bad) a 6.5″ stainless version with a compensator, and 7.5″ and 14″ stainless variants (and I may be missing some). But this looks like a well-balanced gun for field carry and use: I’m thinking if I were to pick up a .500 Magnum, this would be the way I would go.)
• There’s a nice section of Keith gun photos from the auction.

I’m sure I’ll find more as I go through this: I’m hoping to have down time to do so during the upcoming week.

Half-Price Books had another one of their coupon sales last week (the 4th through 10th).

Unfortunately, this was a busy week for me between voting and Wurstfest and meetings and other things, so I didn’t get as much of a chance to shop as I would have liked. Also, the gun book pickings have been kind of slim recently. Even the big central Half-Price has gotten rid of a lot of their fancy leather-bound books.

The only gun book that I found was A Varmint Hunter’s Odyssey by Steve Hanson for $10+tax after coupon. This is another one of those books published by the (now sadly defunct) Precision Shooting Press, and as I’ve written before, I like to snap those up when I find them.

Other than that…I found a nice trade paperback copy of Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James to replace my old hardback. I enjoy this book (though James sometimes makes me go “What?!”) and didn’t realize that the trade paperback had some additional material. (Including James’s list of his 100 top true crime books.) $4.24+tax after coupon.

And I also found a good copy of The Annotated Tales Of Edgar Allen Poe by Stephen Peithman for $6+tax after coupon. Oddly enough, I did not have a collection of Poe’s short works previously, and it is a well known fact that I’m a sucker for annotated books…

…so now I’ve got my eye out for a copy of The Annotated Poe by Kevin J. Hayes. Because you can never have enough Poe.