Expert shooting coach, teacher, and competitor Don Currie delivers a solid book on gunfitting based on a lifetime of experience gained from working with Orvis and Purdey. Don knows that shooting with a properly fitted shotgun is critical to a shooter's success, and he delivers on the art and science of fitting proper shotguns. The science requires the gunfitter to understand the structure of the shooter's body and what stock specifications are needed to accommodate the shooter's physique. To master the art of the process, the fitter must understand how shooters shoot and how the eye and brain see and read the target. The fitter must critically evaluate the shooter's stance, mount, and level of experience along with taking into consideration the shooter's discipline and style and how the shooter will develop and evolve.

Gun Craft examines today's artisanally made guns, as well as the craftsmen who make them. In it, the author takes the reader into the workshops and factories of the world's best gunmakers, making their sometimes-arcane craft skills accessible and relevant to anyone who shoots, owns or collects fine guns. Each chapter explores a separate topic; each has been chosen, however, to provide readers with a unified insight into the complicated task of making hand-made guns in both Europe and the United States.

The third edition in Blue Book's ground breaking Italian Master Engravers Series features father and son master engravers Giancarlo & Stefano Pedretti. This 9x12 hardcover landscape format deluxe coffee table book features stunning color and B&W images of the Pedretti's finest works.

This is the best and most comprehensive guide for those new to the world of fine guns, and a standard reference for everyone, written with the precision and the seamless grace that is a Michael McIntosh's trademark style.

The "bible" of the firearms industry for accurate value information and descriptions of rifles, pistols, and shotguns. The industry standard for over 25 years!

"Largely as a result of Leonardo's innovative work for the Sforza court in Milan, a rich vein of naturalism developed in North Italian art during the late fifteenth century. Questioning the strongly classicizing, idealized style dominant in areas south of the Apennines, artists in the region of Lombardy turned to an investigation of the natural world based on direct observation and adherence to strict visual truth. This heritage of realism continued to be of key importance for more than two hundred years, finding its greatest expression in the art of Caravaggio and eventually influencing the course of Baroque painting throughout Europe. Religious scenes, portraits, and landscapes were all transformed by this new naturalism, which also spurred an interest in still lifes and genre scenes as subjects for paintings. Painters of Reality, titled after an influential exhibition held in Milan more than fifty years ago, is the first study in English of this major aspect of Italian art. Reexamining the subject in light of copious subsequent scholarship, the authors of this volume contribute major essays that define and discuss naturalism as it appeared in both Lombard paintings and drawings. There is also a fresh consideration of the Northern Italian predecessors whose influence is apparent, either directly or indirectly, in the paintings of Caravaggio. More detailed discussions of the subject center on the precise elements that constituted Leonardo's "hypernaturalism"; the important schools of painting that arose in Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and Milan; and Caravaggio's most notable successors in northern Italy, who kept Lombard realism alive into the eighteenth century. Map, artists' biographies, bibliography, and index are also included" -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

The second volume of Leonardo Studies explores a dual theme of nature and architecture, offering a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship on these two abundant subjects. While Leonardo worked on his Treatise on Painting, he noted that understanding the physical properties of nature must precede individual projects of painting or designing buildings. The volume begins with the Trattato, and follows with physics, geology, painting that imitates architectural structure and vice-versa, and proceeds to architectural projects, questions of attribution, urban planning, and and the dissemination of Leonardo’s writings in the Trattato and its historiography. This impressive group of articles constitutes not only new research, but also a departure point for future studies on these topics. Contributors are: Janis Bell, Andrea Bernardoni, Marco Carpiceci, Paolo Cavagnero, Fabio Colonnese, Kay Etheridge, Diane Ghirardo, Claudio Giorgione, Domenico Laurenza, Catherine Lucheck, Silvio Mara, Jill Pederson, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Cristiano Tessari, Marco Versiero, and Raffaella Zama.