The World of Beretta. Cloth binding - 2000

In the original dustsheet. Tan cloth binding with gilt title. The reference book on this subject. Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta, S.p.A., the oldest industrial firm and the oldest gunmaker in the world, launches its 475th anniversary with the publication of this lavish history and celebration of a unique world of Berreta firearms. Beretta remains under the stewardship of its founding family and reigns as one of the few international brands symbolic of unsurpassed quality. Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for hunters and firearms enthusiasts. We publish books about shotguns, rifles, handguns, target shooting, gun collecting, self-defence, archery, ammunition, knives, gunsmithing, gun repair, and wilderness survival. We publish books on deer hunting, big game hunting, small game hunting, wing shooting, turkey hunting, deer stands, duck blinds, bowhunting, wing shooting, hunting dogs, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home. Review: If you love Beretta firearms, you must buy this book, because it is easily the finest reference work ever published about the history and products of this grand old company (up to the time of its publication in 2000). I have deducted one star from this five star book because it has no index, a necessity for any reference book. I was also a little disappointed with the quality of the illustrations. Most are surprisingly low resolution, and therefore do not resolve well when you zoom in to examine fine details. Some illustrations are collages, many of which contain 3 or 4 dozen items. In the print version of this book, each item in a collage was virtually impossible to see, but the collages are usually high res in the Kindle version, so one can zoom in. Here the problem is the captions. A few of these run for more than a page! Now a sensible procedure with illustrations of this complexity would be to number each item in the collage and then identify these items by their numbers in the caption. Instead, Wilson chose to identify the items by their position in the illustration. You have no idea how confusing this can be until you try to zoom in. The process goes something like this: you identify an item using the caption. You zoom in, and the thing you are trying to see is not where you expect it to be. So, you zoom out and you realize that you missed a semicolon in the caption's extremely small print. You swear at Wilson, zoom in...But you get the idea. But believe it or not, these are quibbles. This book is unique, and probably deserves five stars. Just don't get lost while trying to navigate through the collages.