The Illustrated Directory of Guns: A Collector's Guide to Over 1500 Military, Sporting and...

Reader Reviews
First, the book does contain quite a bit of information on several types of guns, and the pictures are very clear and well done. There is a lot of good, if brief, historical information on quite a few interesting guns from around the world. I've enjoyed flipping through it with my kids introducing them to a lot of old weapons and explaining how they worked. However, the book doesn't feel like they finished it. There is no introduction, no index (which would be helpful for a "directory"), and a severely limited table of contents. There are sentences that just end in the middle. The word wrapping around some of the pictures is awkward and choppy. The book is arranged by type of weapon (pistols, revolvers, long arms, shotguns, machine guns, submachine guns, etc), then each section is loosely alphabetically arranged by country of origin and then loosely alphabetically by manufacturer and model. In the pistol section, I found my self going from flintlock to semi-auto and then back to cap-n-ball. The book seems to cover some brands, like Colt, Remington and Smith & Wesson in great details, but then skips over others. For example, the only Ruger Revolver listed is the Model 117 Security Six. What about the Ruger Single Six, Vaquero, Blackhawk, Redhawk, or GP100? The book covers a couple older Czech semi-autos, but the CZ-75 and derivatives are nowhere to be found. For submachine guns the Israeli Uzi is absent. For machine guns, there is no mention of the Gatling Gun. I'm sure there are others, but the lack of an index or useful table of contents makes it hard to tell what is there and what is missing. I think this will be a good book once they get it out of the rough draft stage. Any decent word processor can produce a detailed Table of Contents and Index. Write an introduction, fix the typos, fill in the gaps, and work on the organization. Add "year(s) produced" to the gun specifications. If I was grading this, I'd give it an incomplete.


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