Havilah Babcock, a beloved English professor at the University of South Carolina, has often been described as the unofficial poet laureate of the bobwhite quail. “Call him Bob White, quail, bird or whatever you will in the rest of the country,” he wrote, “but to elder sportsmen of the South, this saucy little patrician is still partridge. It is lese majeste to call him anything else.” Matters of terminology aside, anyone who samples and savors Babcock’s writings will be enchanted. Strangely enough, the origin of his grand tales came from chronic insomnia, and he turned pen to paper during morning’s wee hours in a fruitless search for an antidote. He may have suffered mightily, but posterity can feel blessed that sleeplessness left us a bounty of immensely enjoyable and insightful tales devoted to the bird he fondly described as “five ounces of feathered dynamite.” As might be expected of someone who served as the head of a university English department for decades, Babcock was a master of words…

Nestled beside a fairy-tale lake in northern Italy, Gardone Val Trompia is home to so many fine engravers, it could be the world capital of counterfeiting. Instead, it is to Italy what the Connecticut Valley has been to the United States: the center of the firearms industry. Unlike its American counterpart, this iron-ore-rich area in the province of Brescia has been producing guns for almost five centuries. Change there occurs gradually: In 2002, when Caesar Guerini brought its first shotguns on the market, “We were the only new factory in that valley in 50 years,” says Wes Lang, President of Guerini USA.

Brescia’s pool of skilled engravers and other craftsmen supplies the talent Guerini needs to produce over-and-under smoothbores widely hailed in the sporting press. “All our hunting guns are upland bird guns,” Lang says. “That’s our specialty. They’re really popular with quail hunters, especially the 20 and 28 gauge. They also like our ultralight models, made with high-tech aluminum alloy.” Sales, he says, are evenly split between hunting guns and target guns that offer every configuration a trap, skeet, or sporting clay shooter could want.