WINCHESTER: An American Legend by R....

WINCHESTER: An American Legend by R. L. Wilson, photography by G. Allan Brown (Random House: $65; 404 pp.). You don’t have to be a gun nut to appreciate the superbly detailed photographs in this book that shows off guns as meticulously crafted and beautifully engraved as Patek Philippe watches and Faberge eggs. The color pictures make fine art of the precise, spare machines with their elaborate decoration. But when it comes to the text, it does help to be a gun nut; the author apparently has unearthed every scintilla of relevant (and not so relevant) information for his “official history of Winchester firearms and ammunition from 1849 to the present.” Most readers just won’t care that much about guns and bullets and shells. For them, the story of Oliver Fisher Winchester, shirt maker turned gun maker, will be a labyrinthine journey through a company’s history, and they will be better served by skimming the text and studying the photos.