Summary
For only the fifth time in its 65-year history, Gun Digest  – the world’s oldest and best selling firearms annual – has a new editor.
Me.

The first annual Gun Digest

To – how shall I put this? – many of our more seasoned readers, Gun Digest literally needs no introduction. In the long-gone Indiana of the 1960s, my brother and I eagerly awaited the day when our father would bring home the new edition of Gun Digest. When it came, we read it for weeks on end, eventually reducing it to coverless tatters. Dad called it “the greatest bathroom book of all time.” My brother and I called it pure gold. Think of it – where else could you find articles on virtually any firearms-related topic, all written by the greatest gunwriters who ever put pen to paper?

Even now, forty-some years after I read my first Gun Digest, the names of these writers are still as much a part of me as my own fingerprints: Elmer Keith. Jack O’Connor.  Francis Sell. Maj. Charles Askins. Lucian Cary. Hank Stebbins.  Warren Page. Dean Grennell. J. B. Wood. Larry Sterett. And maybe a hundred more.

For a book that was to become a monument of firearms literature, Gun Digest had a humble beginning. As Ken Ramage explains, “During the years preceding World War II, Milton Klein owned a chain of sporting goods stores in the Chicago area. He also had a thriving national mail order business through which he sold many sporting items, including firearms.

1968 Gun Digest cover

“After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, production of sporting firearms was stopped as factories shifted their efforts to military arms. Klein's mail order business suffered. “In 1943, believing that if shooters couldn't buy guns, they just might buy a book about guns, he advertised the first edition of Gun Digest in his catalog for $1.00. He had no idea if or when a book would be produced, so he offered a free calendar as part of the deal, with the promise of a book to come later. He received tens of thousands of orders - all accompanied by dollar bills – and Gun Digest was born.” Klein tasked one of his employees, Charlie Jacobs, with developing a publication – kind of a book, kind of a magazine – that Klein’s could sell in its stores. Thus did Charles R. Jacobs, the forgotten man of Gun Digest, become its very first editor.

The first Gun Digest, published in 1944, was a skinny little thing that bore scant resemblance to the annual we all know and love. It included a mere handful of articles (but featured O’Connor and Askins, among others), and its “catalog section” was a photostat of a separately-printed price list, unillustrated, that was slipped into the front pages.

There was no 1945 edition of Gun Digest. Sales of the new book were good enough, however, that subsequent editions appeared in 1946 (basically a reprint of the 1945 edition), 1947, and 1949. In 1948, a fellow named John T. Amber, a salesman for Marshall Field and Company’s Chicago gun shop, contacted Klein and suggested that the book could be more, a lot more, than it was. So it happened that in 1949 John Amber began work on an all-new Gun Digest, which finally appeared as the 1951 edition. By that time a new company, Digest Books Incorporated (DBI), had been launched to publish Gun Digest, and Milt Klein was its owner.

1989 Gun Digest cover

It is one of the greatest regrets of my life that I never got to meet John Amber, who died in 1986. Although he’s been described as a cranky, crusty old curmudgeon, I’m thoroughly prepared to like anyone who kept a genuine Gatling Gun (an 1877 Police Model) on his desk. But, more than that, it was Amber’s style, his old-school way of doing things, that could make a 10-year-old kid from Indiana want to grow up to be just like him.

In 1979, Amber was succeeded by Ken Warner, a very talented fellow who had been editor of American Rifleman, Gunsport, Gunfacts, and other firearms magazines. Warner also created the NRA’s American Hunter magazine in 1973. In 1999, Warner was himself succeeded as editor of Gun Digest by another Ken: Ken Ramage, with whom I was privileged to work for several years here at the offices of the Digest’s new owners, F+W Media. Ken was the first editor of Gun Digest who had been employed with a gun-related manufacturer, in this case Lyman Products of Middletown, Conn. Before moving on to the staff of Shooting Times, Ken had been a Lyman product manager and had been largely responsible for introducing Lyman’s popular line of black powder guns, including the justly-famous Great Plains Rifle.

53rd annual Gun Digest cover

Ken, who is new enjoying a well-earned retirement, was at the helm of Gun Digest during the digital revolution of the 1990s. In that one decade, Gun Digest went from a literally camera-ready paste-up to a full-digital publication. And if you think the digital revolution made things easier overnight, I’ve got a very nice bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to show you some time.

So here we are in 2009. I’m the first Gun Digest editor who is mostly like you, if you are who I think you are. I’ve never been employed by a gun company, never founded a gun magazine, but I’ve been buying, selling and trading guns of all types for more than 30 years. A week doesn’t go by when I haven’t fired something: a Mauser C96, a Krag, A Remington 673, a S&W .38-44 Outdoorsman, something. My taste in firearms ranges from wheelocks to flinters to cannons to caplocks to Dardicks and Thompsons and drillings and vierlings and nearly everything in between. In a former life I worked in higher (?) education and the defense industry, but guns and the people who shoot them are my lifelong passion. I’m a gun guy.

And it’s the gun guy in me that has dictated the contents of the upcoming 2010 Gun Digest. I have adhered to John Amber’s time-tested formula of presenting the latest in firearms development, combined with solid research and entertaining pieces you just won’t find anywhere else. Ever wondered what it’s like to shoot a 2-bore rifle?  Ever heard of the .19 Calhoon Badger wildcat? Want to know what’s new with scopes and optics and rifles and shotguns and gunsmithing supplies and reloading components and rifles and tactical gear? If so, the 2010 Gun Digest has been developed with you in mind. It’s got more content, more writers, and more information for your dollar than any other firearms annual and any previous edition of Gun Digest itself.

In an era when many other publications are folding their tents, Gun Digest is still going strong. This is no accident; it’s a testament to the efforts of four supremely talented individuals named Jacobs, Amber, Warner, and Ramage. They – and you, the loyal readers of Gun Digest – represent the very best that the firearms community has to offer.