Ugly traditional guns

[Black Jaque Janaviac]

Can anyone recommend a good book with photos of good lookin' Flintlocks?

I've parused a few at my library and they're no fun.  Seems that the ones deemed worth photographing are ones of extreme collector's value.  Ones owned by French Kings and such.  Those guns tend to fall off the deep end of ornateness, to the point of detraction.  Some literally have so much inlays that the wood grain is covered up.  And at first glance the guns look like they were taken from some ancient shipwreck and are consequently covered with barnacles.

Does any one else love scrolling through Track of the Wolf's On-line catalogue - just to look at the artwork?  Seriously!  They do an absolutely fabulous job of photographing guns.  And for whatever reason, modern gunmakers have a unique way of adding just the right touch of relief carving and inlay to BRING OUT the guns' beauty rather than covering it up.  

I'm the kinda guy who likes to look at 'em, but doesn't want to necessarily own 'em.  

I think I'm going to recommend to Track that they publish their own book of gun photos.

[Tbaus]

Have you seen George Shumway's "Pennsylvania Longrifles of Note", or Toby Bridges "Custom Muzzleloading Rifles"? Two good illustrated books IMO. Good shooting..

[Charlie Detroit]

Glad to hear that someone (besides me) has some taste in firearms...form follows function, after all, and maybe before all. I've always thought that the great majority of the super-fancy presentation pieces were in remarkably bad taste...sort of like Hendrik Willem van Loon's remarks about Versailles (I'm paraphrasing here) that if Al Capone had tried for something twice as big, twice as expensive and in twice as bad taste, he would have failed on the last one.
I live the simple, clean lines of American "Kentucky" rifles, made to do a job, not to impress the peasants. Lots of "working" arms have similar qualities.

[pendennis]

Ugly didn't end with muzzleloaders.  Notice how ornate the Winchester Model 70 became.  Notice how stocks on Remington 700's use to have enough gloss to reflect all the way to the moon?  I guess it took Bill Ruger and his Model 77 to get things back to "normal".

[kevin]

Well if were on the subject of ugly has anyone else besides me looked to the Dutch trade guns or the Russian trade guns that have shown up,during the mountain man reign or lets look at the fore runner of the gun the very simple match lock musket or the beautiful and ornate wheel lock, or the miliquet lock made famous by the spainish or the dock lock, but if real ugly comes to mind the ones used by the arab nations during the French reign in the middle east now tthem thigs were real ugly.
                                       Kevin