Excerpt from A Bibliography of Guns and Shooting: Being a List of Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Books Relating to Firearms and Their Use, and to the Composition and Manufacture of Explosives; With an Introductory Chapter on Technical Books and the Writers of Them, Firearms Inventions and the His So many books have been written upon guns and shooting that no apology is needed for publishing a guide to them. Incomplete and inadequate as the compilation may be, it is better than none at all; for, if practical utility be the standard by which to measure the value of technical books, few will rank higher in the estimation of students than do bibliographies. To the book collector this work will be probably of little value: it was compiled for the use of a writer, not a book buyer, and is both conceived and arranged with a view to best serving the needs of the student. Having departed from the customary method of arrangement, a short explanation is desirable. The classification of books according to the accident of the initial letter of the name of the person writing them entails much additional labour upon all who consult a bibliography in order to identify a book, instead of for information concerning the writer of it; the arrangement of books alphabetically by titles is equally objectionable; and the method of Rumpf, who classed the books in accordance with their size, is worst of all. The classification by authors' names is a survival: in days when authors were few, men of erudition were supposed to know at least the names of all, and doubtless possessed some idea as to the dates at which the various authors wrote. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.