A glossy goldmine of firearms history...

[Mike Irwin]

A few weeks ago I brought home some boxes of gun magazines that I had amassed while I was living at home before and during college.

Mainly there are issues of Guns & Ammo from the late 1980s back to the late 1960s, but there are some Shooting Times and one or two others.

I've been using these as "Reading Room" material while... well, you know.

Anyway, it's been REALLY fun to pull out some of these articles...

In the first several magazines I pulled I found:

Reloading for the .41 Mag.

A Color History of the Handguns of Webley & Scott

Introduction of the S&W Model 24-3 (just bought one of these last year)

Shooting the Japanese Arisaka by Robert Shimek, one of the only reasons I continued to buy G&A after about 1985.

A proof house article on the Iver Johnson PT-22, which came up here recently, and an example of which my Father owns.

And perhaps the most interesting, an article from 1970 on .40 caliber handgun rounds, and how it was a "forgotten" chambering in the United States. Looks like we've remembered!

Oops, also forgot the great column by Elmer Keith on large-bore African rifles. That was pretty nifty, and also from the early 1970s.

G&A was by and large pablum and didn't require a lot of thought to process, but it still had its fun points.

 

[Old Fuff]

Well now we know why Mike is so smart .....

 

[4v50 Gary]

"Rediscovering" old material is a lot of fun. It's good to learn what contemporary people read or believed for certain periods. That's why I enjoy reading old books (or books that were published a long time ago and reprinted). Old magazines are also very good. The old American Rifleman of the '30s-'40s and so forth had a lot of do-it-yourself articles that no attorney would allow to be printed today.

 

[Mike Irwin]

"The old American Rifleman of the '30s-'40s and so forth had a lot of do-it-yourself articles that no attorney would allow to be printed today."

When I worked for American Rifleman from October 1990 to April 1994, guess where you could find me during lunch most days?

Yep, in the library reading articles written WELL before I was born.

 

[blades67]

So, how has the parchment paper held up since you were a kid?

 

[4v50 Gary]

The NRA Library is happy to help you do research on an old article. For a buck they'll send you a copy. I had one article sent to me and used it to write an article that will appear in a blackpowder magazine this year.

 

[Mike Irwin]

Different library, Gary.

American Rifleman has its own firearms reference library.

If anything, it's better than the general library because it concentrates on firearms alone, and there's a lot of stuff in there that's not available in the main library.