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A 240-page book · Second Edition · 2026

You know what that rifle is.
Your son doesn't — and there's nobody left to tell him.

240 pages, second edition: the world America's hunting rifles came out of, the decisions that ended it, and the rites nobody ever wrote down — ending in ruled pages for the record only you can write. Written for the man who has owned them for fifty years.

A Rifle for My Son, second edition — book cover
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A PDF, by email, within a minute of ordering. Read it on a computer, a tablet or a phone — or print it out on ordinary paper.

Drawn from federal hunting-participation data, published firearms histories & firsthand accounts from New Haven and the deer camps

Every rifle worth owning is bought twice.

Once by the man who carries it — and once, in his mind, by the boy he means to give it to. He knows the year it was made, the man who carried it before him, what it cost new. What he doesn't know is whether anyone will take it. A Rifle For My Son is the covenant. Know What You're Handing Him is how the next man keeps it.

What's Inside

Six parts. Thirty-four chapters. Seven appendices. One vanishing world.

01

The First Gun

Part One

The air rifle at five or six, almost always at Christmas.

Plymouth 1886, Rogers Arkansas, the Red Ryder in 1938. The safety catechism recited word-perfect to a father who answered only not quite until the boy had it exactly. The backyard, the green army men, the sparrow that did not get up — and the six words a father said about it.

02

The Second Gun

Part Two

The .22 across the counter, and a week's wages handed over with it.

The rifle that taught patience, the Marlin 39A, eleven million Model 60s. The kitchen table on a Tuesday with the gun in pieces and Hoppe's No. 9 in the air. And the names that belong to no company that ever existed — J.C. Higgins, Ted Williams, Western Field, Revelation, Glenfield.

03

The Making

Part Three

Twenty thousand men in New Haven, fitting wood to metal by hand.

The men who taught America what to want, and the magazine that arrived on the kitchen table every month. Steel. The Mauser claw. Walnut. The cities that made them.

04

The Cuts

Part Four

One dated decision at a time — proved, not asserted.

1964 at Winchester, and what the company said about it that year. New Haven to North Haven. Wingmaster and Express. Southgate, California, 1991 — told by a gunsmith who was on that floor and lost his job fighting for the standard. JM. Ilion, after two hundred and eight years. And March 31 to April 1, 2006.

05

The Thinning

Part Five

The empty stands, and the shack that ran for a century.

The last man with nothing to sell. The shack that held the dead in the company of the living. The blood on the face. Why the boy didn't come. And the last man at camp — a Sunday night thousands of men have lived, each believing himself alone in it.

06

The Handoff

Part Six

The rifle comes off the wall, and the question gets asked out loud.

Will there be anyone to take it? The book does not pretend to answer it. It ends with two pairs of hands at the edge of a field in November.

07

The Reference Vault

Appendices I, II, III, V

How to read a gun in four seconds — before you read a letter on the barrel.

Bottom metal, checkering, extractor, bluing, wood-to-metal fit. Serial numbers and date codes, including the pre-64 Model 70 cutoff and the Marlin and Remington barrel codes. The house-brand decoder. And the numbers: the 1982 peak at 16.7 million hunters, and the age wall that four percent of men over sixty-five are still on the right side of.

08

What Was Never Written Down

Appendices IV, VI, VII

A field guide to the vanished rites — because a rite carried only in the doing disappears the first season it isn't done.

The catechism, the withdrawal, the blooding, the buck pole, the letzter Bissen, holding court, the horns, and the radio reading births and deaths into the dark at camp. Then the practical business of passing it on — wills, family exemptions, state lines, honest appraisals. And ruled pages for the record only you can write.

The Book

A Rifle for My Son.

240 pages, second edition. An instant download, with a 7-day guarantee.

The book costs less than a box of .270 shells — and about a third of what one bad appraisal on one rifle will cost you.

A Rifle for My Son, book cover SECOND EDITION

A Rifle for My Son

240 pages. Second Edition. Ends in ruled pages you fill in.

$27
  • The air rifle at six, the catechism, the first sparrow — where a boy started
  • The cuts, dated one at a time: 1964, North Haven, Southgate, Ilion, 2006
  • The thinning — the shack, the blood on the face, why the boy didn't come
  • A field guide to the vanished rites, set down before the last men who knew them
  • Ruled pages at the back: you're the last person alive who holds it
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Common Questions

Before you order.

By email, within a minute of ordering. What you get is a PDF — the same kind of file your bank sends. It opens on any computer, tablet or phone with nothing special installed, and it prints on ordinary paper if you'd rather hold it. Nothing ships, and there's nothing to wait for: you can read it tonight.
Seven days, money back, no questions asked. Keep the files either way — if the book didn't do what it promised, we'd rather you told us than paid for it.
A Rifle For My Son, second edition — 240 pages, six parts, thirty-four chapters and seven appendices, ending in ruled pages for your own rifles. Delivered as a PDF, straight after checkout.
Some of it. And five sites will agree with each other while all five are wrong, because they're copying the same estimate. The book shows you where that happens, and what the surviving record actually supports.
No — and you don't have to decide now. A Rifle For My Son is the story: the world these rifles came out of, and the handoff that may or may not happen. There is a companion manual, Know What You're Handing Him, that teaches you to pick up a gun you've never seen and read it. You'll be offered it once, right after checkout, and you can decide then.
A register for your own rifles: maker, model, serial, year, what it cost, who carried it, the hunts, the story behind every mark, and who it goes to next. That information exists in exactly one place — in you. Fill them in and the book goes in the case with the rifle, and the next man opens it and knows what he's holding.
Every entry in the reference sections is graded. [SOLID] — established and consistent across the standard references. [GENERAL] — right in the great majority of cases, but transition guns and gunsmith swaps exist. [VERIFY] — the shape is right, check the specifics against a dedicated reference before money changes hands. Where the record is thin or disputed, the book says so rather than handing you a confident wrong number.
Second edition, and it's nearly three times the first. Eight new chapters on the years before the .22 — the air rifle, the catechism, the sparrow. The cuts proved with dates rather than asserted, including a gunsmith who was on the floor at Southgate in 1991. A full reference vault. And ruled pages at the back. Readers' own accounts are in it, identified by place and age rather than by name.
No. Every update is free for life. The second edition has already gone out to first-edition readers, and anything that comes after it will too. Buy once, and you get the book as it stands and as it grows.
You get it, free, for as long as the book exists. Corrections come in from men who were there — a date, a serial range, a rite practiced in one county and nowhere else — and the book absorbs them. That's how the second edition happened.
A history, with a reference vault at the back — how to read a gun in four seconds, serial numbers and date codes, the house-brand decoder, and the federal numbers behind the decline. Written so the man who has handled guns for fifty years doesn't catch you out on page nine.
Then you're the intended reader. This isn't for the man who can't tell a Marlin from a Mossberg. It's for the man who has known for fifty years that one rifle feels right and another doesn't and has never had the words for why — and who now needs to say it out loud to somebody who wasn't there.
No. Winchester is one part of six. The book covers Remington, Marlin, Savage, Mossberg, Daisy, Cooey and the house brands — J.C. Higgins, Ted Williams, Western Field, Revelation, Glenfield — along with the camps, the rites, the making, and the federal numbers behind the decline.
The cardboard box test. Two air rifles seventy years apart, one empty box, about thirty dollars. It's the only claim in the book a boy can establish with his own hands in an afternoon, and it's why that chapter exists.

Also available: Know What You're Handing Him — the identification manual.

The rifle will outlive you. The story won't.

Everything you know about that gun — who carried it, what it cost, the year it was built, the marks on the stock and how they got there — exists in one place, and that place is you.

$27 · 240 pages · instant download
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