“Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016
(English-language
reference and popular history.)
This is the first
book from the author, Ian McCollum, who is a mechanical engineer and
firearms historian with both a popular blog and an equally popular
YouTube Channel. (Proving the old adage that mechanical engineers
study weapons and civil engineers study -and build- targets.)
Yann Carcaillon and
Jonathan Ferguson are also contributors, James Rupley did the
majority of the (uniformly excellent) technical photography, and the
Editor was N.R Jenzen Jones. Following its crowd-funded launch, this
book is published by Headstamp Publishing (2019) and is now available
from them at this link.
This is a
collector’s reference book and also a more popular history book on
a slightly niche subject, which has already aroused sufficent
widespread interest to justify itself. It is well-crafted in every
sense of the word, in that it functions well as a reference book in
addition to being absorbing to simply read through, and although the
gilt page edges are unusual in a book of this nature (the
crowd-funding was very successful indeed) in general the money has
been spent on practical quality and durability rather than cosmetics,
which is exactly what one might expect from a military firearms
historian.
A reference book is
only as good as the index and this one shows signs of careful thought
rather than computer-driven auto-assembly. Some books this size have
a forty-page index, this is four pages but, coupled with the way the
actual text flows, you can use it to navigate to the section of text,
if not an individual page, which should answer your questions. The
index does not reference inside the data tables (it would drive
everyone potty if it did), but these follow a standard format
throughout and once you’ve found the one you want in one chapter,
it’ll be in an identical form in a similar place in another. The
book has its own logic in some ways, but it sticks to this
consistently. Copious endnotes for each chapter are also a possible
bane of reference works and here there are very few. Nearly
everything the reader needs to know is in the text itself and doesn’t
need an explanatory note. The chapter on the FR series precision
rifles has exactly one endnote.
Most chapters
contain some peripheral material: a one-page history of a particular
arsenal, or a short article on a gun falling outside the main scope
of the book but perhaps a parallel development to the main subject of
the chapter. Some of these are written by the contributors. It is
possible to skip these, but I found that they didn’t really break
my concentration on the main issue of any particular chapter: rather,
they added a bit of context. So I found the best thing to do was to take them in my stride as I read.
There is plenty of
tabular data, which is what the specialist gun collectors will be
here for, but it is presented at the point in the story of each rifle
where someone reading out of a more general interest might also
benefit from it. This isn’t going to do the collectors any actual
harm.
Other information is
available in a handful of appendices, such as directors of the
various arsenals through the period covered by the book, or details
of the cartridges used.
NB: cartridges are
dealt with in a way consistent with a general historical approach and
nowhere is there anything resembling loading data! Given the age and
extremely varied condition of most of the rifles under discussion,
publishing detailed data of this nature would be a pitfall rather
than a public service. There is some guidance on decoding the
headstamps for 7.5x54mm ammunition, however: this is published by
Headstamp Publishing, after all!
Review Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer
23rd of March 2020. Updated 19th of December 2020.
