Better And Better

If you don't draw yours, I won't draw mine. A police officer, working in the small town that he lives in, focusing on family and shooting and coffee, and occasionally putting some people in jail.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Go home, Frank C Barnes. You're drunk!

One of my favorite books to kill a few minutes with is the great work by (the late) Frank C. Barnes: Cartridges Of The World. Barnes started the project in the mid-century, and periodically updated it with new editions. I finally threw away my old and yellowed worn-out 2nd Edition copy without a cover, which was missing pages. That old copy referenced .25-06 and .35 Whelen as "wildcats," and which didn't have 10 mm, .40 S&W, or .357 Sig in it. It talked about how the .257 Roberts was being pushed out by the "new 6mms," and talked about how the .45-70 was almost 100 years old!! 

Barnes passed away in the early '90s, and Richard A. Mann picked up the task of updating the mandatory reference manual; it is in its 13th Edition now.  He left in some of Barnes' original descriptions about different cartridges, and put in his own. By and large, he's done a pretty good job, of a pretty good job that Barnes had done. Keep doing a pretty good job for long enough, over a field as broad as this, and you end up with a real work of value. While everyone reads the historical notes and general descriptions of the cartridges, there is also a very valuable specifications section at the back, which gives gross measurements of each cartridge. Most of the rounds have descriptive loads in each section, but I will caution you NOT to use those for hand loading reference. But if you're a shooter, or a collector, or any kind of aficionado of firearms, this is a necessary household reference book.

At any rate, this morning while awaiting my coffee to perk, I let the book fall open where it may, and noticed something odd, for the first time, about the illustration for the classic old black powder cartridge, the .38-40 WCF:
This most certainly is NOT the .38-40 WCF. Perhaps it's the .38-40 WTF?
Without a scale, it's hard to know what caliber is portrayed there. It's obviously a belted magnum, likely of .38 caliber. It has a fairly sharp shoulder, and a long neck. It is most certainly NOT the .38-40 Winchester.
Hey, accidents happen.

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3 Comments:

At Saturday, May 11, 2013 4:57:00 PM, Blogger Old NFO said...

Yep, that could be an error done on purpose to 'mark' the book, or it could have just been an oopsie... either way, it's interesting!

 
At Monday, May 13, 2013 2:29:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

That just went on the Amazon wish list. How did I not know about that before?

Thanks for the pointer!

 
At Saturday, May 18, 2013 3:11:00 AM, Blogger charlotte g said...

Thank God I already have grandchildren. With reading this scintillating, certainly none would have been produced.

 

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