SKS book collection

[theSKSguy45]

I’ve been gathering any literature on the sks I can get and I had some cool additions recently. Some are those bits of paper found in ammo crates, some are manuals, some are “educational materials”

Thought I’d share

[echo1]

Nice collection. I too have a number of manuals (came with rifles in the box) and "Guide to SKS Collecting" books, all of which are full of Chinese dating and other errors that have since been identified but are perpetrated by these books. I got the ones I have mainly because of the pictures and they're about the SKS, even if full of incorrect data.
A couple I don't see in your stack are;
"The SKS Carbine (CKC45g)" Steve Kenya & Joe Poyer (Steve helped import millions of rifles and was directly responsible for the Albanian flood of Chinese guns)
"The Collectors Guide to the SKS" George Lamont with assistance from Adrian Van Dyk. There was a couple of great threads on this book over on Gunboards where Boris had to whip out the MA Duce and mow down a few folks, very entertaining how some people get butt hurt. Not worth the money but really good pictures and there was some new intel, like Paratrooper length rifles with mags captured during Nam (with DD-603 form and picts). PAX

[Phosphorus32]

Nice collection. Thanks for sharing. 

I think this is a very interesting subject. I agree with Echo1 that the monographs on the SKS have a lot of errors. It’d be nice if there was a 98% solid book on the SKS. Errors will be inevitable without release of government records, but they could still be better than the current books. Over-interpretation of limited data is a serious issue with them.



I’ll add a few that I think are very interesting:



A 1962 Soviet little blue book on the SKS (cover on the far left of the trio). Lots of information that needs to be translated for most Americans… That reminds me of an old joke: There are two kinds of people in the world, multilinguals, and Americans 








An English translation of a DDR Karabiner-S manual (cover on the far right of the trio). An obviously interesting point from this is that the “S” in Karabiner-S is for self-loader “Selbstlade”.




A Vietnam War era U.S. Army manual on the SKS (cover in the middle of the trio). Interesting how many different countries of manufacture that they knew about. I was a bit surprised that they were aware of the Yugoslavian SKS, at least the more numerous M59/66 version. I don’t believe an M59/66 has ever been identified in the milsurp collecting community as a Vietnam bring-back.

[theSKSguy45]

I’ve wondered about if a general guide to the SKS would be something that could even be done. Either due to lack of information or the sheer amount of information in the case of Chinese rifles in particular. At the very least an identification guide beyond “early and late Chinese” would have saved me a ton of time. Then as you said new info could make the whole project a futile effort as was the case with a lot of these earlier books (they are an entertaining read though).

Very cool collection, especially the period stuff.