George Cameron Stone's "Weapons & Armor" Book...

[Rat Salad]

For many years, I've been intrigued about the passage written by Ken St. Andre in the 5th edition mentioning the sources for inspiration for the weapon and armor selection in the rules. It finally dawned on me to search it out and pick up a copy of this book. Collectible copies go for big bucks, but I found that there are hardbounds of various editions of the reprint that can be had for reasonable money...think I paid around 15 bucks on the fleabay. Anyhow, George Cameron Stone's "A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor" is an amazing work. What you see in the 5th edition "Weapons Glossary" is pretty close to what you are getting here, except the source is a couple of inches thick! The black and white photos have that museum look to them, and they look to be direct inspirations for the drawings of the weapons themselves in the 5th ed. rules. I wonder if this particular source was utilized for Palladium's weapons and armor books as well, as this really covers it. Anyhow, if you can score a copy of this one, you should. The book is jammed full of amazing weapons, armor and machines...it's like an expansion of what's in the rulebook multi-fold. "700 pages, 10,000 different arms and armor, 875 photo-engravings that illustrate 3,500 different kinds of weapons". Wow.

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[dungeondevil]

I had a copy of that as a kid of 11 or 12, but it was very disappointing. There were few illos and those there were like badly mimeographed copies of poor photos (multiple-generation images, very low resolution, b/w with no greytones). Perhaps I had a pirated copy of inferior quality. I remember waiting for six to eight weeks to get it and was heartbroken that I was mislead.

[Rat Salad]

Really? Man, this one is has photo-engravings, which is an old illustration technique for a lot of early books. It's also full of images. The copy that I looked over as a kid was this one, but the cover was different. They had it at the library in high school. Who knows; possible it's the same one and we are just seeing it differently, or maybe your edition was a different copy of it (as you say). They certainly reprinted it in many different editions over the years.

[alkazar]

MY school library had that book, but I've never seen it in the wild. The closest I've found is a book called Weapons: An international encyclopedia. The thing is not nearly as big but has a respectable amount of photos and drawings of weapons both ancient and modern though mostly modern. Either way I learned what a Francisca is and why you should never stand directly behind a recoilless gun when it is being fired. It would probably come in handy for making a T&T/MSPE variant that takes place in the trenches of WWI or Twilight 2000 or even a walking dead variant.

[dungeondevil]

I've looked around at sample pages online, and it must have been a great book, but vastly different than what I received as a kid. Again, I must have been sent a pirate/bootleg copy from a less-than-reputable bookseller. *shrug* It happens sometimes.

To cite another example years later, I ordered an "army list" booklet for 1:50 scale Napoleonic wargaming, but, instead of getting the genuine article, I got an obviously photocopied batch of paper crudely stapled together. *eyeroll* The West Scottish bookseller illegally copied the booklet, keeping the original, and sent me the facsimile.

[Rat Salad]

I have quite a few of armor and weapons books, and this one is now one of the better ones for sure. As I say, there are many copies of it out there, many of them for pretty cheap. I posted the pictures in case someone wants to make sure it's the one I can vouch for, by matching the cover. I think my copy was about 18 bucks or something like that.