Looking for books

[JeeperCreeper]

Hope this is in the right place.

Looking for winter book reads. Obviously, I want to be entertained first, then educated second.

Looking for classic tales and stories of firearms, hunting, adventures from years past. Early days of Alaskan hunting, tales of legendary safaris, history of technology and techniques.

I haven't read about fun stuff like that since I was a kid, so I don't even have the fundamentals of reading down from the greats like Cooper or Keith.

Looking for suggestions to get me started. Mainstream or cult classics. From the old west to modern.

Thank you thank you.

 

[Jeff White]

I moved this to general gun discussions where it will get more responses.

 

[Old Dog]

For tales of African safaris, I highly recommend anything by Robert Ruark.

The Old Man and The Boy, Horn of the Hunter, A View From a Tall Hill, The Lost Classics (a compilation of stories he wrote in the 50s and 60s), Death in the Long Grass...

I can't remember all the names of his tales, I've been ordering periodically on Amazon to build up my library. Great stuff.

The Art of Hunting Big Game in America by Jack O'Connor. And anything else he ever wrote.

For modern day thrillers written by an author is a student of the gun, anything by Stephen Hunter, particularly the Bob Lee Swagger or Earl Swagger books or something like Dirty White Boys.

​

 

[JohnKSa]

Peter Hathaway Capstick wrote some good stuff. It's unlikely that he did everything he claimed in the books, but he was quite a good writer and the books are enjoyable.

Finn Aagaard wrote a good book about his life. Aagaard's Africa or Aagaard's African Adventures. The latter contains all of the former with additional information added by his wife after his death.

Hard to go wrong with Keith or O'Connor.

 

[dh1633pm]

I bet @Dave DeLaurant might have some ideas.

 

[Jim Watson]

Lucian Cary wrote the J.M. Pyne stories, a fictionalized Harry Pope.

Amazon.com

 

[Dave DeLaurant]

I bet @Dave DeLaurant might have some ideas.

I'll give it a shot, no pun intended.

Too lazy to type this morning, so here's a couple pix of stuff pulled off my shelves:



BTW, I highly recommend any of Jim Corbett's books on hunting in India. His memory for detail decades after the fact was phenomenal!



Lesser known -- Bell is up to Volume 3 of this series and all are fascinating. I'm rereading this volume right now for the third time, at the rate of one gunfight per evening:

 

[doubleh]

All I would recommend have already been mentioned. My high school library had some of Corbett's books and I really enjoyed them. Capstick told excellent stories too and don't overlook Aagaard and Rourke. O'Conner was my favorite but for some reason I never got into Keith's stuff. I should probably try him out again to see if my opinion has changed.

 

[entropy]

Of a more classic literature bent:
Meditations on Hunting, by Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, by Ernest Hemingway

The first explains why we hunt, the second points out why it's not a good idea for some guys to bring the other half along.

 

[Dave DeLaurant]

Of a more classic literature bent:
Meditations on Hunting, by Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, by Ernest Hemingway

The first explains why we hunt, the second points out why it's not a good idea for some guys to bring the other half along.

I lusted after and finally acquired my Mannlicher-Schoenauer carbine in 6.5x54 from reading Macomber in Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro short story collection.



My wife later bought me a copy of Hemingway's Guns for Christmas. She was the best memsahib.

 

[entropy]

It's one gun still on my list, but I'm not letting SWMBO touch it, she watches too many Dateline type shows.

 

[rust collector]

For lighter fare, Corey Ford's adventures of the Lower Forty were fun reads in small doses. Patrick McManus was fun, although it sometimes seemed that he went a little over the top. I read every Jack O'Connor piece I could get my hands on, and always enjoyed Jim Carmichel's writings as well. Gene Hill's collected works were also good for a lazy afternoon in front of the fire.

 

[PistoleroWadcutterGANG]

Dean Grennell (sp sorry) books on reloading or pistol and revolver shooting. Finn Aagard on hunting. A helmet for a pillow. Sledgehammers accounts of Pacific Marine combat in South Pacific. If you can find the; JDJones and his comments thoughts on wildcats, the whisper cartridges and general gun musings.

 

[Jeff62]

I like the Gutenberg library. Old obscure writings you can download for free. I like the firsthand accounts of duels and diaries of Civil War soldiers. There is too much to describe.
The Internet Archive is another great site.

 

[doubleh]

As an added notes see if any of Skeeter Skelton's writings are availble and include John Taffin. Some of his magazine articles are available on his SIxgunner website.

Edited to add: Being curious I went to Amazon to see what was available from each. There are 3 from Skelton but the tariff is high. Taffin has more available and has one for Kindle at only $9.99.

 

[4v50 Gary]

Card catalog? Ask a librarian?

You can browse through what Log Cabin Shoppe or Dixie Gun Works offers and after identifying the books you want to read, see if you can get it via inter-library loan.

I just learned that inter-library loan is organized on a regional basis so if you're in an obscure area like the Great American SW, you could be SOL. Our area is really bad and the college librarian couldn't get my requests filled. Now if you're in a major area like NY or SF/LA, the likelihood of borrowing the book is much better.

Archives.org has plenty of free stuff. I found the US Army instruction for making SoS. LOL, not that I would want to make it myself since there are better things to eat.

 

[4v50 Gary]

On that image of Ernest Hemmingway, that is a sporterized 03. It looks like it has a Lyman (or Redfield) rear aperture sight but is that a G&H QD scope base mounted on the receiver?

 

[doubleh]

I just learned that inter-library loan is organized on a regional basis so if you're in an obscure area like the Great American SW, you could be SOL.

That applies to a lot of things, Our libraries in the county and our junior college does that but I don't know what luck I would have finding any of the authors mentioned in this thread.

What library still uses a card catalog? Even as backward as we are it's all been a computer search for many years. You have to stand at my local library (kind of a cheapskate place) but the one 22 miles south of me has chairs to sit in while searching plus a ton more books. Type in any author you are interested in and it will show the titles available and at what libraries they can be found.

 

[Dave DeLaurant]

What library still uses a card catalog? Even as backward as we are it's all been a computer search for many years. You have to stand at my local library (kind of a cheapskate place) but the one 22 miles south of me has chairs to sit in while searching plus a ton more books. Type in any author you are interested in and it will show the titles available and at what libraries they can be found.

The library I worked at for 26 years (Fresno County) automated their catalog in 1988 -- I worked a lot of Saturdays adding records back then.

If you want to see titles for potential interlibrary loan, the big resource is worldcat.org. The problem is that the database is so large that you need to have a pretty specific idea of what you are looking for before searching it -- you'll be overwhelmed with results otherwise.

My library can usually get me most of the titles I want -- the last was Czech Firearms and Ammunition. It's going for around $165+ on the used market, so it was nice to borrow a copy for free:

https://worldcat.org/title/36821865

 

[Buzznrose]

Another great read are Coopers Commentaries

Jeff Cooper's Commentaries

Jeff Cooper's Commentaries: a series of commentaries on the human condition from the Gunners Guru, released during the years 1993-2006.

dvc.org.uk

 

[NIGHTLORD40K]

For a Sci-Fi twist on the concept of an armed populace, "The Weapons Shops of Isher" by AE Van Vogt and Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon" (An Armed Society is a Polite Society) are classics. "Glory Road" has a few cool gun moments too, in addition to being a damn fine story.

Not a book, but Fritz Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol" is a clever, spooky short story if you can find a copy.

 

[tark]

This is far and away the most incredible book on African hunting you will ever read. John Hunter was born near the end of the 19th century, in Scotland. He relocated to Africa and became a "White Hunter" as they were called back then. The British still controlled Kenya and he worked for the game department. He hunted Africa during the glory years, between the wars, when elephants with tusks a hundred pounds a side were common. He has been on lion hunts, with the Masai, who use only spears and short swords. He had shot, for the game department, over a thousand Rhino. The tusks in the second pic weigh 140 pounds each. At various stages in his career he was a game ranger, a PH and an Ivory hunter.

I have read, Hemmingway, Roosevelt, Ruark, Capstic, Bell, Keith and just about everyone else who ever wrote a book on African hunting.

None can ever begin to match this book. And it's all true.

 

[DustyGmt]

If you have Amazon prime, log into Kindle and although I haven't checked in a good while, there were alot of gun books for free and probably most of the titles suggested in this thread are likely available and I think you can sample the first ten or so pages for free and see if it grabs your interest.

I read a few on there, can't recall all of them but one if them was a W.D.M Bell book that was awesome even though I don't have good recall on it. Some of them are really bad though, you could tell that some of the Gunfighting books were written by people who knew less about guns than they did about writing.....

 

[Jim Watson]

John ”Pondoro” Taylor was an old Africa hand with a couple of books.

 

[Dave DeLaurant]

For a Sci-Fi twist on the concept of an armed populace, "The Weapon Shops of Isher" by AE Van Vogt and Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon" (An Armed is a Polite Society) are classics. "Glory Road" has a few cool gun moments too, in addition to being a damn fine story.

Not a book, but Fritz Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol" is a clever, spooky short story if you can find a copy.

Shangahi McCoy and I have discussed Heinlein and Van Vogt recently (I just re-read the Weapons Shops earlier this year), but the Leiber story is a new one for me -- I'll have to hunt of that one down.

Don't forget the M1 Garand firefight with NAZI scumbags on the surface of the Moon in Heinlein's Rocketship Galileo:



For SciFi with guns, try H. Beam Piper. He was a collector himself, and even wrote a mystery novel Murder in the Gunroom that was plotted around the gun collecting scene in the late 1950s. Not the greatest mystery per se, but very entertaining for the back-story details.