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If I had to choose just one gun book to keep (for some inexplicable reason), Edward Ezell's "Handguns of the World" would be on the short list of books to consider. It's a remarkable combination of history and mechanics, or the most common and obscure details, and detailed at a great price. It was published by Barnes & Noble, apparently along the lines of the seemingly endless variety of /"Gun Encyclopedia/" books that contain a bunch of glossy pictures and less information than Wikipedia. The difference is that Edward Ezell was a firearms historian of the highest order and wrote an extremely informative book instead of the usual superficial overview.
At 700 pages long, /"Handguns of the World/" focuses on automatic pistols from their first appearance in the 1890s to the end of World War II (you won't find any models here). after war). It includes chapters on every country in the world involved in handgun development, including the United States, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Finland, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Whether you want to learn more about the Luger or 1911 or the Hino-Komuro or the Sosso, it's all here. The first chapter on military revolvers provides a very good background for the development of semi-automatics, and also includes a very interesting table of these weapons categorized by lock type – something rarely covered by other authors.
The two negatives I would voice about the book are its photography and its scope, if I may be so demanding. The illustrations are all black and white, and some are quite dark. It would be nice to see a full color glossy edition, although such a thing clearly won't happen. It would also be nice if the scope of the book extended beyond 1945, to cover more recent developments, such as the SIG and Beretta lines, among others. That said, asking for such things is truly the definition of looking a gift horse in the mouth, when you consider what's in this book and at what price.
I would highly recommend Ezell's /"Handguns of the World/" to both the advanced collector and the complete novice. Both will get a lot out of it.
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