Deejay
Senior Member
2017 will surely be remembered as a banner year as far as German smallbore training rifles literature is concerned : after Robert Simpson's book, Bruno Guigues's 145 German Smallbore Training Rifles has just been published.
This book is very obviously the catalogue of its author's extensive personal collection and each rifle pictured in it is carefully referenced and fully photographed to an extent which, to the best of my knowledge, had never been seen before.
What particularly struck me upon browsing through the pages of the book for the first time was the quality of the pictures and the vivid colours that give the eighty-year-old items pictured in it a very lifelike appearance, as if the book were a kind of time capsule.
Worthy of note is the presence among the rifles illustrated of the (unique ?) prototype Mauser DSM 38, of which, according to Simpson's book (page 228), "it is not believed that even a prototype of this design was ever constructed".
A rather nice feature of this book is the constant juxtaposition of 80-year-old documents with the pictures of Bruno Guigues's rifles.
Bruno Guigues's VERY extensive collection does not only cover German 22. LR trainers but every single item related to the smallbore shooting training of German youths and soldiers during the Nazi era.
Unlike Speed and Simpson, Guigues deliberately chose not to write lengthy texts to make room for the maximum number of (mostly) colour photographs (some 2,838 of them! ) in his 384-page book.
Price : $100 (shipping included from France to the US - 2/3 weeks).
https://www.naturabuy.fr/LIVRE-145-german-smallbore-training-rifles-1920-1945-item-3916647.html
http://www.kkw-dsm34-22lr.com/
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