Books and research are essential to successful collecting. One of the best ways to avoid making bad purchases is to know enough about what you are buying, that you don’t have to rely on the seller for anything.  One of the great satisfactions in collecting is making good finds.  Through research on your finds, you get to make additional discoveries of the history behind the pieces in your collection. A lot of the enjoyment that I get out of collecting comes from the discoveries that I make through reading and research.

The Internet is a tremendous research tool as well.  The BCN is a product of the Internet and has not only been a huge help to my research and learning, but has increased the quality of today’s bayonet books through the collaboration that it enables. There are also a number of good forums, where one can post questions and search for answers. A couple of forums that I frequent are gunboards.com and surplusrifle.com. With over 1 million posts, gunboards.com is one of the largest forums on the web.  Surplusrifle.com has forums, articles and other helpful information on collecting and shooting.

The following pages contain list of my favorite bayonet and firearms reference books, a list of articles, and other reference material.  Click here to view a tagged, searchable catalog of my personal reference library. I add books to my library frequently, so check back periodically to see what I’m studying.

Firearms Books in my Library

Articles

Misc. Reference Material (lots of good stuff in here)