Price of gun books

I know that info is valuable, and, to my mind, the worthwhile gun books can be counted on your fingers, even allowing for a few fingers missing

but this is taking the piss:
Brassey's Essential Guide to Military Small Arms: Design Principles and Operating Methods: Amazon.co.uk: Derek Allsop, etc., et al: Books

I blame the internet.

Every small used bookstore I go into now has incredibly high prices on things that used to be cheap, because they go online, find out the highest ever selling price worldwide, then price theirs at that price.

However, you could save a bit by buying internationally-

Amazon.com: Used and New: Brassey's Essential Guide to Military Small Arms: Design Principles and Operating Methods

$299 USD is only a measly 200 pounds.
So by buying from the US dealer, you save 300 pounds- just think of what you could do with 300 pounds!

even cheaper here-
Brassey's Essential Guide to Military Small Arms: Allsop, Derek;et al - AbeBooks - Tom Williams (ABAC/ILAB)

I recently bought a nice copy of The Machine Gun, by George Chinn-
Machine Gun: History, Evolution, and Development of Manual, Automatic, and Airborne Repeating Weapons (Volume 1 of 3 Volumes): Chinn, George M. - AbeBooks - Book Sails at The Mariners' Museum
and I had to pay seventy bucks for it.
In the good old pre computer days, a book like that was usually 25 dollars or less.

Too much information is not always a good thing.

Ries said:

I blame the internet...

...Too much information is not always a good thing.

Click to expand...

I whole heartedly agree

I got my copy of Alsop, Popelinsky et al, new back in about 2002, for a miserly £50. I got a real shock when I linked to it in the 45 broomhandle post.

Chinn is bloody good.

I'm just discovering his work for myself. I have an old copy of WHB Smith (before Edzell gave it a sorely needed clean out and edit), which I used to use for biographical info. It looks like Smith lifted that wholesale from the much better written Chinn, and didn't carry over Chinn's excellent referencing and appendices, or cite the source - cheeky git! he manages to have annoying "special notes" about almost any irrelevant feature, but not his sources perhaps I shouldn't speak ill of the dead.

Have you seen the scans of Chinn's books on scribd? Weeks and weeks worth of distraction there - deffinately too much info.