Posted by Ed Muderlak on April 27, 2007, 12:21 pm, in reply to "Ed Muderlak"
Thanks for the positive response. As to my new book, the present publishing environment is making it difficult. The printer that published my "Parker Guns: Knight of the Trigger" has gone bankrupt after 38 years, and as I posted, Safari Press and Countrysport and Krause are laying low, hoping that the book publishing business might recover (and I don't think it will). Thus I may have to go it alone, possibly on a subscription basis, not that I'd finance my book with other people's money (like The Parker Story), but that I'd need some indication of support before I undertook the task. The manuscript is complete and edited at 120,000 words (about the same as Parker Guns: The "Old Reliable") and I have 150 color pictures, over 200 line cuts, and about 50 B&W.
The content is largely applicable to SxS's of all makers, while using the Parker as the thread holding it all together. There's a chapter about Baker and his pre-LCS 3-bbl gun, and a chapter about box locks versus side locks, which features the LCS in comparason to the Parker, Fox, Lefever, Ithaca, etc. All the prior books about the various fine SxS's dwell on the Where-When-Who-What of s/n's, manufacturing numbers and dates, grades, people involved at the plant, and the like.
"Shooting Flying: Parker Guns and the American Experience" delves into the Why and the How fine fowling pieces and shooting flying emmigrated from England, and shotgun sports developed domestically, helped along by America's developing industrial gunmakers such as Parker Brothers, LCS/Hunter Arms, Dan Lefever, Wm Baker, Ansley Fox, Boyd & Tyler, Ethan Allen, Eli Whitney, Colt, Winchester, Wesson, Roper, et al. One chapter--aptly titled "Apple Pie versus Spotted Dick" (a British dessert)--goes into the difference between sport hunting in England and America, and how our fine SxS's quickly displaced the imports as more and more Americans took up the shotgun sports in the pigeon ring and afield after the Civil War.
I expect to make the go/no-go decision this Summer, after I rattle some more publishers' cages. Several are sitting on my M/S with a when-in-doubt-do-nothing attitude. I heard at the Decoy Show and Sale yesterday from a Krause published author that there are serious problems in Iola WI, which should be apparent to anyone who reads the "Gun List." A fallback position is that the 42 chapters could be more than 10 years of articles in the Double Gun Journal. Investigation Continues. EDM