I have been a bit off on my blogging because college tennis season has come in like a lion and I am the “racket tech” for Wake Forest University’s #3 nationally ranked men’s team! In fact, I was just in Charlottesville, Virginia with the team for a major tournament. While there, I made sure I hit up some of the used and independent bookstores in town, since despite its other charms my current home town is a bookstore desert.

I was happy to find, at Read It Again, Sam bookstore on the downtown mall, a small but dedicated section just for firearms. And within that section, a Firearms Classic Library edition of Charles Edward Chapel’s Guns of the Old West.

I already have a paperback reprint of this book by Dover Publications of Minnesota, but it’s much nicer to have a genuine pigskin Saderra leather, Himalaya grain edition with gilded edges and brass-die stamped, 22-karat gold lettering on the spine. It makes a nice companion to my FCL edition of Pollard’s The Book of the Pistol & Revolver, which I also got used and wrote about recently.

As nice as it is on the outside, I first picked this book up — at Old Books on Front Street in Wilmington, NC — because of Chapter VI: Pocket-Sized Death: Development of the Famous Deringer.

I wish I was clever enough to come up with that as a chapter title for my book! Oh, well, back to the drawing board.