A History of the Small Arms made by the Sterling Armament Company: Excellence in Adversity

Good information, as it is basically a reprint of the Collector Grade title "The Guns of Dagenham" by Peter Laidler and David Howroyd. So far so good, but what really, really irks me, is that this is advertised under a new title, as a first edition and with some random muppet listed as the author! It is suposed to be an updated version, but they have not even bothered to have Peter Laidler write a new foreword, but have reused the original 1995 dated one (complete with original title I might add). Nice enough if you do not already own the original, and have now been tricked into buying an identical book!

Where to start... I gave 3* because the info is excellent (not that there's much to cross-reference it with other than Matt Moss's Osprey book which is much shorter and takes a different approach) but because the production quality does not befit a book in this price range.This is a new re-print and update of the Collector Grade book "The Guns of Dagenham" that's out of print and commands a heavy premium on the second-hand market. The authors acquired the rights to the original CG book, and have re-published it (supposedly with updates) at Pen and Sword.It's quite clear from the book how they did this. They seem to have taken a copy of The Guns of Dagenham, scanned it, OCR'd the text, and cobbled it together that way. So the quality of the images is a little sub-par, and nobody seems to have bothered to proof read it! It's absolutely full of OCR issues (cl>d, rn>m, 80>BO) amongst others. So we read about "modem warfare", "the SABO rifle" and many others. Plus random font and size changes.And there's even out of date info that could have been updated - "at the time of writing, the L85A1 is still the standard rifle of the British army" or words to that effect.All in all, a very, very poor show for an RRP of £40/$60.

Great value compared to the original edition... Even if you have to accept a bunch of typos that have crept into the new edition due to scanning of each page to avoid the labour of re typesetting.