Highly recommend to find topics by CharlesS: he made his life passion to collect unusual weapons, transitions from one well-defined pattern to another.
His examples are mind-blowing! It is like observing Darwinian evolution at high speed.
The stuff I learned from his examples, - about evolution of particular weapons as well as about general approach to the history of weapons, - taught me more about collecting than many books.
Our hobby is orders of magnitude more complex and exciting than even Stone's Glossary:-)
One definitely needs to know the basics, but it is the occasional unique examples that illuminate the field like a sudden lightning. The learning never stops.
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