When I was a kid, our public library had a wealth of books about firearms. Landis, Howe, Sharpe, Crossman, Whelen, to name but a few were all well represented. I had those guys darn near memorized by the time I went away to college. Then began the task of acquiring as many of them for my own library that I could. (That public library even had a wonderful tome on making pyrotechnics and explosives, published in the 1920's as I recall. Interestingly, it was gone from the stacks a few years ago when I went looking for it out of curiousity.)