The Illustrated Directory of Guns: A Collector's Guide to Over 2,000 Military, Sporting and Antique Firearms

This book is so wonderful and the knowledge is great. I would recomended this book for anyone who loves old guns and the history.

I have to agree with the other reviewers-this book has a lot of potential; it lists a lot of guns and includes interesting info about many of them. But there are a lot of glaring omissions and flat out inaccuracies. A 2nd edition that is much better edited could be a five star book.

This large book features very well photographed firearms in full color throughout. It's a good effort, but seems like a work in progress, and has many gaps in coverage. I believe what the author has done is take a group of available firearm images, and make a book. The first contributor mentioned at the back of the book is a provider of images at Rock Island Auction Company, and my guess is that most of the firearms pictured were auctioned by that company at some time. If you have purchased something at auction from them, check the book, as it may show your firearm. It would be quite a feat to show every firearm every produced in one book, especially with the high quality imagery featured in this book. This book advertises itself as covering over 2000 of them, which is quite an undertaking. I think it's a useful book, and I especially like the antique firearm coverage. The firearms are listed by country and manufacturer. To give an example of a significant gap in coverage, I would note that in the "Rifles and Longarms" section, coverage of Swiss rifles does not include the K31 Rifle, the PE57 Rifle, the SIG AMT Rifle, or the SIG 550 series. The Smith and Wesson Revolver section also has very choppy coverage. The Submachine Gun section does not include a Model of 1921 Thompson! (it does include an M1928A1 and M1A1 TSMG) It also does not include a Reising Submachine Gun. One common error I found was on the first page of the "Submachine Guns" section, where a man dressed in a suit holding a gun is shown in "The classic gangster pose with a Thompson Submachine Gun." The only problem is he is NOT holding a Thompson Submachine Gun, but a West Hurley Thompson Semi-Automatic Carbine with the longer barrel and "cheese grater" actuator knob, characteristic of the semi-auto Auto-Ordnance Thompson Model 1927A1. This will be missed by most, but demonstrates that the author and whomever edited the book had insufficient knowledge of these particular firearms. I don't expect a book to be perfect, but this book is hit and miss. An index would earn it another half star, in my opinion, as it would be a very useful tool. If the author can expand this edition further, and have some experts review it prior to re-publishing it, it would climb the ranks of firearm reference books, and retain much more value than it currently does. It is a good start. I will reference it mostly for the picture examples. I would still recommend adding this book to your library, but I can only give it a 3 star rating at this point.

Well, it's a great big coffee table book, with lots of nice photos. However, there are some glaring errors here.

I'll leave aside the strange spelling and syntax errors, which appear to show carelessness in editing; though these errors are scattered profusely throughout the book.

The real problem I have is with the sloppy research on some of the important firearms. For example, the entry for the M1 Garand rifle (pp 420-423) says "The M1 was also produced in a carbine version..." and shows the M1 Carbine, clearly indicating that the M1 Carbine is somehow a cut down version of the Garand! "Carbine" Williams must be rolling over in his grave; the two arms have nothing in common, other than both being gas operated. They were of totally different design, developed by different people, and used different ammunition.

There are other such fundamental errors, which detract substantially from the book's appeal. However, I will give the author credit for his efforts to be comprehensive; there are many fine arms in here which I have not seen referenced in any other book, including the Chilean Modelo 1912 made by Steyr (pg. 279), an example of which I am proud to own, and about which this book did provide some useful information.

A bit more careful attention to detail would have made this a five star book. I hope that later editions clean up the errors and make this the world class reference book that it deserves to be.

I bought this book as a gift for my dad who has quite a large collection of guns. Personally, I'm not very knowledgable as far as the makes, calibers, countries of origin, and original uses of the various gun types; so I could not judge whether or not the book gives accurate information for each weapon featured in the book.
I did glance through a few pages. For each firearm listed there is a clear photograph provided and a paragraph of information. I would not call the paragraph too short, but neither would I say that it goes very in-depth. I read a couple paragraphs and found myself wanting more information.
Guns are listed by type, then country of origin. I did notice that there is no index at the back of the book, so if you want to find a particular gun, you need to at least know what kind of gun it is; country of origin would also be helpful.
I would say this book is best suited for an experienced gun collector who already knows a lot about guns, in general, and just needs something for quick reference.
I'd also like to add something about the size of the book. It's probably around 12 inches tall, 10 inches wide, and about 3 inches thick. It weighs a ton!