Author's comments on 2nd edition Encyclopedia of Spring Air Pistols

Author's comments on 2nd edition Encyclopedia of Spring Air Pistols 

The Encyclopedia of Spring Air Pistols, 2nd Edition

Comments from the author John Griffiths

As with all collecting hobbies, air gun collecting needs reliable sources of information, whether it be online resources, like this very Gallery, or books and magazines. The collector can then find out what there is out there to collect, and can research the history, rarity and value of specific models, and can also enjoy reading about the technical and historical aspects of the subject. In fact, even collecting the air gun books themselves can be a rewarding aspect of the hobby. 

When I started collecting air guns some 50 years ago, I soon decided that, while I would keep a small representative collection of vintage air rifles, I would specialise in air pistols.  These offer many advantages to the collector – such as their incredible variety of form and mechanism, their long history, and the fact that they do not take up much room, so making them easy to store and display.  

Although pneumatic pistols have much to commend them as target guns,  I soon became more fixated on spring air pistols, as these seemed to offer more for the collector. For example, the ingenuity encountered in many of the cocking systems never fails to amaze, and the fact they are for the most part self-contained powerhouses is an added attraction.

In the 1990’s there was really only one book that dealt specifically with air pistols, namely Dennis Hiller’s  Collectors Guide to Airpistols. Excellent as it was, in its final and largest 1993 edition it still only covered a very limited number of models, so I made the decision to write my own book devoted to spring air pistols, and to try to make it as exhaustive as possible. 

I knew that this would take several years, so the lengthy process of data collecting began, helped by the collaboration of many other like-minded collectors, and as my collection grew I was able to write about more of the guns from first-hand experience. 

Information grew exponentially with the advent of the internet, and in 2008 the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Spring Air Pistols was published. The book provided illustrations, descriptions and histories of more than 500 guns, and was well received, soon selling out.  Unfortunately at that time colour printing was very expensive, so the majority of the illustrations were in black and white, but  a decade later, when colour printing became much cheaper, the distinct possibility of being able to produce an affordable  second edition in full colour arose.  

So I began rewriting the book, encouraged by the fact that so much new information had come to light in the intervening years, and by the fact that my personal collection also had grown considerably. By 2022 the second edition was written and it was published in that year. 

It now had 30% more pages than the first edition and covered around 700  guns, mostly illustrated in full colour.  As before,  the encyclopedia was written primarily as an identification guide, which was also a source of much additional information on manufacturing histories, production dates, inventors and patents. The author hopes that this second edition will provide the ‘go to’ book for spring air  pistol collectors for many years to come.