Don't let your safe get soldfor one number.

Markings live in eight places. Men check two.

The other six are under the forend, under the buttplate, on the upper tang beneath your thumb, and inside the loading gate. Serial numbers, date codes, proof marks, and the import stamp after 1968 that tells you a gun came in as surplus. Then a six-step method, and variant tables for what's actually in American safes — Model 94, Model 70, 870, Mossberg 500, 336, 10/22, K-frame, GP100, Glock generations, the 1911, Savage 99 and 110. Plus a chapter for when you can't identify it at all.

Two guns wearing the same name are often not the same gun. This part is how you tell which one you own.

MSRP is fiction. I set those tags for seven years.

How the number on the tag actually gets built, what a spiff is buying when a man steers you, and five upsells that add price and nothing else. The sixty-second used check. Bore, timing and lockup. Five signs a gun was butchered by somebody's uncle. Pawn shops, gun shows, police trade-ins, and what auction photographs are hiding. Then eight chapters for men buying under a real constraint — hands that don't work the way they did, recoil, eyes, hearing already lost, one gun and no more money coming.

One bad buy avoided pays for this book eleven times over.

It isn't humidity. It's dew point.

Which is why guns rust inside safes in rooms that feel dry. What a hundred and fifty, six hundred, and two thousand dollars actually buy you in storage, and the eight-dollar fix that outperforms most of it. Why an oil-soaked stock can't be glued, and how to get the oil back out of one. What your grandfather used and why you shouldn't. Then a diagnostic tree that starts at the symptom you're looking at — stovepipes, light strikes, failures to feed, keyholing, a group that opened up — and tells you whether it's the ammunition, the magazine, or the gun.

And it names the two failures you don't diagnose at home. You unload it and carry it to a gunsmith unfired.

There are two words that cost families more than anything else.

They get said at a counter by somebody who doesn't know what he has. Grading your own honestly. The 1898 line. The three value-killers. Why the famous gun is almost never the valuable one, and what's actually appreciating. Three prices for the same gun, and which one you'll get. Then the inventory, insurance, the estate playbook for the first week, what never to do, and how to tell people who gets what while you're still here to explain why.

My friend Doyle's safe went to a shop for one flat number. Forty-one years, one number. This part is so that doesn't happen to yours.

Eight appendices, and the one page you'll carry in your wallet.

The sixty-second check, printed on a single page for standing at a counter. The price reference and the failure index. The handing-down ledger, the cost-per-round ledger, and the grading worksheet, ruled to be filled in. Sources organised by what each one can and can't answer. And Appendix H — two pages listing what's not in this book and why.

That last one is there to make the rest of it believable.