If you’re looking for a history of military weaponry book with a twist, check out what’s coming soon from Canfora Publishing in Sweden. In coming days, they will release Aircraft Weapons Of World War I, a collection of photos of the wild and weird weaponry of aviators in the Great War.

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World War I saw rapid adoption of airplane use in combat, along with a lot of other military technology that was very unpleasant if you were on the receiving end—stuff like poison gas and machine guns. At first, airplanes were basically used the same way that hot air balloons had been used earlier in combat. Ground forces sent up airplanes to use for observation.  However, as the war dragged on, aircrews started working out how to attack their opponents in the air as well as the ground.

That made for incredibly rapid development of air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons; at first, aircrews were attacking each other with rifles and pistols, and by the end of the war, they had machine guns synchronized to fire through a propeller without shooting off the blades, along with other clever inventions. For a few months, the Germans’ head start in air weapon development left the British and French air forces seriously disadvantaged, resulting in oddball aircraft engineering in order to adapt ground weapons to airplanes.

This book has photos of such planes—British “pusher” aircraft, along with many other planes and aircrews of the conflict, and their weapons. Here’s what Canfora says about the book:

World War One introduced the concept of aerial combat, and this book presents the visual documentation of the weapons of the first air war. From rather humble beginnings in the war’s early days, with pistols and grenades carried aloft, to the strategic bombers and heavily armed fighters of 1918, the aerial ordnance of the Great War is displayed here in stunning vintage photographs. Designed with modelers, aviation enthusiasts, gun collectors and gamers in mind, the photos collected here detail the weapons mounted on Allied and Central Powers aircraft, from pistols and flechettes to cannons and massive bombs.

And in the “About the Author” section:

From his secret base in North America, buried deep beneath a mountain of historical photographs, Tom Laemlein has been redefining the concept of the military history “photo study” for the past 20 years. Leveraging his massive photo library, Tom has a knack for publishing images that expose the details of the weapons and battles of the 20th Century, much to the delight of a global audience of historians and modelers. This is his fourth book for Canfora Publishing.

The book is 160 pages long, with more than 350 photos. It’s now available from Canfora for the price of 33 euros. See more details here.