Whipped Cream Difficulties

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.

This week was another Half-Price Books coupon week. And I picked up a few things. Most of the books I bought were firearms related, so I thought I’d pull a Lawrence and document some of them here.

Small Arms Profile 17: Smith and Wesson Tip-Up Revolvers. This is a thin little pamphlet dated January 1973, and published by Profile Publications Ltd. in the UK. Profile had at least 17 other books on various types of small arms (including one specifically on ammunition). It also looks like they had separate series for aircraft, cars, and warships: I think they catered, at least in part, to model makers. This had a cover price of $2 US/40p UK in 1973 dollars: sources tell me that’s closer to $20 in 2018 money.

I was a little hesitant to shell out $6 for an 18 page British handgun publication, until I opened the front cover and saw “By Roy G. Jinks”. That’s pretty much a “must buy” flag.

Defensive Pistol Fundamentals by Grant Cunningham. This isn’t particularly rare or hard to find, but I note it here because it is one of KR Training‘s recommended books. $10 with no coupon discount (because I used the coupon for other things), which is inline with Amazon’s new price, but this is pretty much “like new” as well. I don’t feel rooked.

And I’ve written before about how much I like picking up those Firearms Classics books at a steep discount. I added a few more to the collection:

Not from the Firearms Classics library, but a limited edition reprint (#1383 of 1500) from “Wolfe Library Classics”: Big Game Rifles and Cartridges by Elmer Keith. (Originally published by Thomas G. Samworth, much like so many of these other books in my library.) $12 after 40% off coupon.

(Damn. I really ought to pick that up.)

Firearms Curiosa by Lewis Winant. I’ve only had a chance to flip quickly through this since I bought it on Friday, but it looks like a whole lot of fun: there’s an entire chapter, for example, on “Knife Pistols and Cane Guns”. Not a Samworth book, oddly. $6 after 40% off coupon.

Actual Firearms Classics Library reprints of actual Samworth books: With British Snipers to the Reich by “Captain C. Shore” (“a classic hands-on, nuts and bolts, how to sniping book” according to the intro), and Shots Fired In Anger by Lt. Col. John B. George. What I didn’t know, until I flipped through the introduction to Shots, is that these two books complete my quartet of Samworth “war” books (the other two being McBride’s A Rifleman Went to War and Dunlap’s Ordnance Went Up Front). Together, the two of these with one coupon were $22.50: I probably could have gotten away with making three trips instead of just two, but I didn’t want to push my luck. And I’d been looking for a copy of With British Snipers for several months now.

Finally, this is in the Firearms Classics Library, but I think this copy may be a true first (I’m having trouble tracking down bibliographic information):

Experiments of a Handgunner by Walter F. Roper. Roper was a somewhat famous gun guy: among other accomplishments, he designed the N-frame “Target” grip for Smith and Wesson revolvers. Yeah, the dust jacket is pretty badly worn (it has a plastic cover protector). But I’ve never seen a copy of this before – Firearms Classics or otherwise – and it was $12.50 after coupon.

Lawrence forwarded me a link to a website that looks interesting, and that I hope to be able to explore further in the near future: targetballs.com.

Yes, yes, I know: you didn’t know targets had balls. Ha ha, very funny. But seriously: targetballs.com is “the online presence of On Target!, The International Journal for Collectors of Target Balls”. “Target balls” being what exhibition shooters used in their demonstrations if they weren’t shooting live birds, and before the “clay pigeon” was introduced.

Quoth the “About” page:

These balls, similar in size and appearance to today’s glass Christmas tree ornaments, were the “only substitute ever invented for the living bird,” something that Annie Oakley is said to have had silk streamers stuffed inside, something that in one summer the Bohemian Glass Works (in New York City) was making at the rate of 1,250,000 over six months’ time, something Buffalo Bill Cody chased after on horseback, “old ladies” darned socks on and babies allegedly cut their teeth on — all according to an 1878 ad! In their heyday, target balls sold for a little over a penny each; today one ball has sold for as much as $28,500, although “common” balls, generally in amber or blue, can be acquired for as little as $100.

Of course, you can’t really talk about target balls without talking about the people who used them. Which is why On Target! tickles my fancy: I’m going to have to scrape up the bucks for a subscription and set of back issues.

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Found at Half-Price Books a few days ago:

Precision Shooting at 1,000 Yards, edited by Dave Brennan. I’ve written before about the late and much lamented Precision Shooting magazine: I think I’ve also mentioned that there was a small press associated with it. I try to snap up books from that press whenever I find them, because:

• they’re usually jam-packed with information
• Even if they are old, the fundamental principles of accuracy don’t, and won’t change, barring some major revolution in arms technology (like caseless cartridges and electronic ignition systems, both of which have been ten years away for the 45 years I’ve been an avid person of the gun).

This is a collection of articles from the magazine. I paid $40 minus a 10% coupon for it, which is a little more than I usually like to spend on gun books. But asking prices for used copies on Amazon are in the $75 and up range, and the condition was good…

…and what made me pull the metaphorical trigger, so to speak, was the two-part article included in the volume, in which a small handful of eccentrics (and I mean that in the best possible way: I want to hang out with these guys) attempt to recreate Billy Dixon’s legendary long shot at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874.

Whodewhatnow? Billy Dixon was a buffalo hunter. He was part of a small group that was attacked by Comanches at Adobe Walls, Texas. They were besieged for the better part of three days (the Comanches initially intended to slaughter them in a sneak attack, but rolled a critical fail on initiative): on that third day, Mr. Dixon, encouraged by other members of the party, took a shot at a group of mounted Indians about 7/8ths of a mile away (remember, he was using an 1874 vintage Sharps rifle, with black powder cartridges, and no telescopic sight)…

…and knocked one of the warriors off his horse. The Comanches broke off the siege shortly afterwards.

For the rest of his life, Billy Dixon never claimed that the shot was anything other than a lucky one; his memoirs do not devote even a full paragraph to “the shot”.

(Side note: the Dixon memoirs are available from Project Gutenberg.)

(Side note 2: Mr. Dixon sounds like another person I’d love to have a few beers with. I love one of the things the authors of the Precision Shooting article say about him: to paraphrase, he didn’t hunt buffalo for the money, but because he loved long range shooting. Hunting buffalo was a great way to indulge that passion, and by the way make a few bucks on the side.)

Last time Mike the Musicologist was in Austin, this came up in discussion, though I disremember exactly how: I think we were discussing contemporary makers of falling block rifles, which led to a Google search, which led to me finding either this one or this one.

One other thing I find intriguing about this article: the shooters used rifles and bullets as close to Dixon’s as you could get at the time of their experiment, but used a modern smokeless black powder substitute instead of actual black power. Their reasoning for this:

What many modern shooters might not know is that black powder was, in that era, as highly developed as today’s best smokeless powders. Produced in England, Curtis & Harvey’s Diamond Grade was the world’s best, likely because of a superior charcoal root stock and extended blending time. As folklore had it, their charcoal came from a certain type of willow tree that grew only in one locale. Further, C&H could afford to prolong the blending operation because they could get a premium price for the superior product they produced. Serous target shooters widely acclaimed Kentucky Rifle from a United States producer, Hazards, as the best alternative choice but, nonetheless, a second-best choice. Behind these two premier powders came an entire plethora of brands, manufactured in various places around the world.

The author goes on to note that, if there was sufficient demand, someone somewhere would be turning out super-high-grade black powder today. But there isn’t enough demand, so the quality smokeless BP substitutes seem like a good choice for consistent results.

This casts a new light for me on a quote of the day I highlighted a while back from another buffalo hunter: “…by then I had begun to use the English powder…and it added 10 to 30 percent efficiency to my shooting.” I suspect this might have been a reference to the C&H product. Sadly, the Mayer book does not appear to be on Gutenberg, so I haven’t been able to confirm this.

I’m a sucker for those “collector’s” reprints of various firearms related books, like the stuff in the Palladium Press Firearms Classics Library. I’m not a total sucker: Half-Price Books gets these in every once in a while, and while I’m generally not willing to pay their marked price ($30-$35), if there’s a sale or a coupon, I’m there.

I know they generally don’t have a lot of value to book collectors, but that’s fine: I think they look nice on the shelves. Plus, to take one example, I think I paid $15 for Ordnance Went Up Front. Amazon has a Kindle edition for $9, but I’d rather pay the extra few dollars for a nice physical copy. And there’s a lot of that stuff that doesn’t have a Kindle edition.

This is a different publisher, and a little more expensive, but there’s a catch:

Capstick, Peter Hathaway. Death In a Lonely Land: More Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting on Five Continents. Derrydale Press, 1990.

Yes, it’s a reprint. A “limited” edition reprint of 2,500 numbered copies, which makes it almost certainly worthless to collectors and anybody who doesn’t have the word “sucker” stamped on their forehead.

(looks in mirror)

Well, I’ll be darned. Where did that come from?

But I digress.

I don’t remember exactly how I first came into possession of Death in the Long Grass: I want to say I was a teenager (or pre-teen?) visiting my maternal grandmother, we went by a bookstore on one of our rare ventures out of the house, either I talked her into buying it for her grandchild or I had some pocket money of my own, and…

…I was already kind of gun-crazy at the time, but that book was a revelation to me. It wasn’t just that the whole “let’s go hunting elephants in Africa” thing appealed to me as I was straining the bounds of my existence: it was also that the guy could write. The young me found him sometimes screamingly funny. The old me still does. I think sometimes I even try a little too hard to emulate Capstick’s prose style, the end result being something like if you left my prose next to a complete collection of Capstick books and a gallon of milk for a week in a non-working refrigerator outside in a Texas July.

Point being, I didn’t just want to hunt lions and tigers and buffalo like Capstick, I wanted to write like him as well. At least back in those days. These days, I’m working on developing my own style, but Capstick is still an influence.

This was $75, marked down by 50% because of the coupon. It was still a little more than I would usually have paid, but this book has one great advantage that my other Capstick books don’t:

Capstick died in 1996 of complications from, of all things, heart bypass surgery. I never met him – I don’t think he did a lot of book tours, and I don’t move in Safari Club circles – so this is the only signed Capstick in my library right now. It was worth it to me, and to that small boy inside me.

Remember The Jerk?

Some of the good folks who read this blog might be interested to know that the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson 4th Edition is available in print and Kindle editions.

My print copy is on the way, but not here yet. The one person who had copies in Tulsa had already sold out of them when we got to his table. And I do plan to order the digital edition, but not right away: I’m not complaining, but the price of the new digital edition is about double what I paid for the digital version of the 3rd Edition, and just slightly under what the 528 page print edition goes for.

(Why both? Because the digital edition is a lot easier to carry around than the phone book sized print version. But sometimes, I just want print.)