Hitting the library today....

That's nice, do they have a store where you can buy books to, the big one but me does. Used to find some good books cheap. I got a town library like 1/4 mile away but haven't sent there yet, maybe I should soon.

That can be interesting, even when they don't add those items to their collection.
My library sells donated items that don't fit our needs pretty inexpensively.
-And when we got a new library director from New York City, all of our gun-related materials got pulled and tossed - except for what I intercepted... .

Gun books don't last long in libraries. They get stolen, either by gun fans or by the antigunners. The wisest course for a library that was given a bunch of gun books, is to sell them off rather than put them out on the shelves.

Even if a gun book is tagged for reference (not to be checked out), it's probably going to get stolen anyway. Book thieves know that these books are valuable, and they have the skills to take them.

PistoleroWadcutterGANG said:

Here, at our little lib. Any item classified as (special / research / tech / special hold) can only be viewed in the research room. You can't get into it without checking in and they hold the members current I.D

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That's the way it works at the Library of Congress. Yet, even there, books like Audubon's Birds of America (8 million dollars for a first edition) were being vandalized. Thieves, using razor blades, would excise the hand-colored drawings to sell them on the art / home decor market.

Among gun books, a prime target for thieves has been George Chinn's multivolume The Machine Gun. I used to read this in the Austin, Texas public library until it mysteriously disappeared. (This was way back in the 1960's.)

There was a guy here who would check out one of the few gun books in the library, keep it, and tell the librarian "Oops, I lost it. I'll pay for it, how much did it cost?"

My town's little library got rid of all books not fiction, history, or geneology several years ago. They ripped out all the shelving, carpeted the area, and turned it into a children's reading area----and you never see any kids there.

We don't really have a reference section anymore at my century-plus-year-old library.
Everything circulates except for some school year books that haven't been digitized yet.
Most of our newer acquisitions are ebooks and audio books.
At this point they outnumber our physical items.
They're pretty hard to steal or vandalize.
-As for gun-related materials, they keep pouring in from the woke libraries that are discarding them... .

AlexanderA said:

That's the way it works at the Library of Congress. Yet, even there, books like Audubon's Birds of America (8 million dollars for a first edition) were being vandalized. Thieves, using razor blades, would excise the hand-colored drawings to sell them on the art / home decor market.

Among gun books, a prime target for thieves has been George Chinn's multivolume The Machine Gun. I used to read this in the Austin, Texas public library until it mysteriously disappeared. (This was way back in the 1960's.)

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That is one great series. Luckily, it is free on the web

Chinn’s series at Hyper books:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ref/MG/

Technical gun books command ridiculous prices on Amazon. However the library is your friend. I have been able to inter library loan a number of books that I would have to pay hundreds to acquire. I have to return them, but, I do get to read them.

I complied this list on the technical books I found useful in understanding how firearms work.


“Technical Notes, Small Arms Design”, Author: John G. Rocha , available from Armalite (800) 336-0184, stock number NA1085 $ This soft cover pamphlet is a copy of the course material handout to a firearms class taught at Rock Island in the 60’s. Very interesting, a good number of formulas, but still very readable.

Brassey’s Essential Guide to Military Small Arms, Design Principles and Operating Method, Author Allsp and Popelinsky, Brassey’s Inc, 1997 Out of print. This starts off simple and ends up very technical. This is a serious book and the final sections really require education in math, science, or engineering.

The Machine Gun, Volume IV, parts X & XI, LTC George Chinn, pub 1955. Out of print but free download on web. This book should be the absolute first book to read for someone who is interested in the principles of automatic weapon design. Really an excellent statement of principles. It is a comment on the general state of technical ignorance in our society that the in print book is extremely rare, but the general public is not that much interested in it. A Gun Show book dealer told me more people wanted the volumes with the pretty pictures of old guns!

The Bolt Action by Stuart Ottenson. First edition by Winchester Press 1976. Ottesnon later added a Volume II which came out in a two volume edition by Wolfe Publishing in 1985. These books are very non mathematical for a general audience, but the principles, particularly expounded in Vol 1 on the Mauser 98 are, in my opinion, fundamental to the understanding of bolt action design.

AMCP 706-260. Engineering Design Handbook: Automatic Weapons. Out of print. The most technical and mathematical design book I have found to date. Assumes a high level of knowledge in firearms design, mathematics, and Mechanical Engineering. A technical degree, preferably in Mechanical Engineering is really needed to attempt to understand the presented material. This was created in the early 60’s, and reflects the designs, and the design knowledge of the day. This can be found for free here https://discover.dtic.mil/

AMCP 706-252 Engineering Design Handbook: Gun Tubes. Out of print. Very interesting, not limited to small arms. This is also available for free on the web. https://discover.dtic.mil/

AMCP stands for Army Material Command Pamphlet. There were about one hundred AMCP Pamphlets covering information ranging from Statistics to Automotive Design. Adobe versions can be found by using this search engine: https://discover.dtic.mil/

Small Arms & Cannon, Smith and Haslam, RMC of Science, Shrivenham UK, 1st Edition, 1982, Brassey's Publishers LTD.

Small Arms, Volume 6 of Brassey’s Land Warfare into the 21st Century, copyright 1999. Brassey’s UK, Authors D. F. Allsop and MA Toomey. Out of print. Excellent book, an expansion of reference 2 with more technical data added.

Ballistics, Theory and Design of Guns and Ammunition. CRC press, 2008, Authors Donald E. Carlucci and Sidney S Jacobson. This book is highly mathematical, primarily artillery related. A considerable advancement on interior, exterior, and terminal effects from earlier references.

ILL can be your friend.
Roughly 1/10th of my physical circulation is via ILL.

A pity that Chinn's works aren't on Gutenberg yet.

BTW, we use two different categories of library card: a digital card that you can sign up for online and allows anyone access to our digital collections only for thirty days and a regular card that you must sign up for in person that is good for checking out anything in our circulating collection.

-And you don't need a card to use our computers.
Why can't other libraries do this?

Anyway, back to the gun stuff... .