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Guns of the Civil War
Written and Photographed by Dennis Adler
Crestline Div. of Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., 276 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10001
2014, Orig. Pub. 2011
340 pp. incl. Bibliography and Index
ISBN-13: 978-0-7858-3229-4
I recently reviewed William B. Edwards' classic Civil War Guns https://civilwartalk.com/threads/civil-war-guns-by-william-b-edwards.166605/ in which I observed "Although there are probably over two hundred illustrations sprinkled liberally throughout the text, this is no coffee table tome"; unfortunately Dennis Adler's book on the same subject fits that description perfectly in every meaning of the term, both positive and negative. This is a sumptuous beautiful-to-look-at volume that was likely a labor of love by its author, but one that is unfortunately as short on information as Edwards was dense. According to the biographical information, "author Dennis Adler is a regular contributor to American Rifleman magazine, Guns of the Old West magazine, Combat Handguns, and Harris Publications and is special products editor for … Blue Book of Gun Values." I might observe that none of these are exactly scholarly publications, and that this accordingly reads more like something that would be found in the pages of magazines. Adler's accompanying photography is superb, the cover illustration above a fair example of the many full-page illustrations inside, all on the finest heavy and glossy paper. What then could possibly be wrong with this book?
The answer is, almost everything, apart from the technical expertise in the photography. Look again at Mr. Adler's credentials, weighted as they are in the legendary Old West: the selections concentrate on handguns and carbines, to the virtual exclusion of the infantryman's tools-of-the-trade: muskets, rifle-muskets, and rifled-muskets. Oh, they're there, all right - but relegated to a mere handful of examples on likewise few pages; important but relative oddballs like the Colt revolving rifle and Henry and Spencer repeaters receive far more attention. Similarly, the other products of Colt and other major manufacturers (and collector favorites for the past century) are well-represented, including an unaccountably large number of Derringers and other pocket pistols that likely saw little or no use on the battlefield. These selections would be far more at home in another book on Guns of the Old West than in a serious look at wartime products and "typical" military arms.
The book is divided into six long chapters: A Nation on the Verge of Conflict and the Guns at Hand; Handguns of the Union...; Longarms of the U.S. Military; Confederate Arms; A Litany of Foreign Arms; and Modern Reproductions and Replicas. Interspersed with the beautiful photographs showing the individual pieces in considerable detail is a scanty but interesting and overall effective text that adequately covers the essentials of most principal arms and their makers. However, I found the greatest problem with the final chapter on reproductions and replica arms, fully eighty pages I consider essentially worthless and irrelevant to the subject at hand! But of course that's a purely subjective opinion; no doubt there are many readers who would like to see the many reproductions available of these often-scarce originals. Unfortunately, to me at least, many of these replicas are the garish and gaudy Commemorative Editions that look nothing like regulation or issue arms actually carried by soldiers on either side of the actual conflict!
Speaking again of the many photographs that illustrate and really form the reason this book exists, although many are fine and wonderfully realized still-lifes like the one on the cover, the usually minty examples of often scarce guns are betrayed by positioning them among poor-quality and obvious reproduction flags, uniforms, and accouterments. There are some exceptions, particularly among the cased Colts and other handguns, but too often, interesting specimens are marred by the other things in the picture. Another serious problem is that instead of choosing from among the large collections of Civil War-era arms held by major institutions like the National Park Service at Gettysburg or Chickamauga, the former Museum of the Confederacy at Richmond, or others, Adler has drawn his subjects from a handful of small collections of "minty" examples including his own; there are virtually no truly "historic" specimens such as John Wilder's own personal Spencer rifle or Jeb Stuart's LeMat, to name only two examples. In short, I recommend this work with the strong caveat that it is meant to be looked at rather than useful as a truly informative reference work, exactly like any other "typical" coffee table book.
James N.
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