Aircraft Books

Aircraft & Model Making

     We have a large collection of books on Aircraft and Model Making. The Aircraft books are largely chosen for their value as reference material for Model Making. This means they contain far more photo's than text. These books follow largely the themes of:

• Luftwaffe in World War Two

• RAF in World War Two

• USAAF in World War Two

• VVS (Soviet Airforce) in the Great Patriotic War

     Some books are general but largely they are single-topic related to a specific Model Future Project. See that section of this web site to look up the connected Kit. Some of those Kits will have been built hence you will find the results of all those references within the Gallery sections.

     There are also an assortment of books related specifically to the Models themselves, although these are in the minority. All the books have been collected over many years with the help of various sources such as Amazon and EBay.

     For more on these books and for some detailed reviews, both positive and negative, click here.

Magazines

     There is little point reviewing all the Model Making Magazines that I read on these pages. However it is worth mentioning them, if only because reading them competes with so much time that could be spent reading books. I choose the magazines from the shelves of well-stocked local newsagents and do not subscribe to any. This is because I only wish to buy the ones with content that I might think will have some value. A magazine with lots of articles about modelling 1/72nd scale Biplanes will gather dust, on the shelf of the newsagents, whilst any on building the kind of 1/48th scale military aircraft that interest me, will be purchased. I particularly like detailed build projects where I can learn tips and techniques for building a better model. It is also useful to read reviews or detailed build of models that I have in my collection or may be building in the future. It saves a few pitfalls.

Foreign Language Books

     My collection does contain a growing number of foreign language books bought purely for their photographic reference value. The left there is a recent example the "Red Army Assault Aircraft" Part 1 "Severe School". This was the ONLY book I ever managed to buy from "Armybook.com". I placed the order on 4th of June 2006 but this was all they sent me out of ten books ordered. They had nothing else to send me and were unable to find any of the other books. Which is remarkable because all ten books were NOT in the "Special Order" section. They were Catalogue items. Anyway - the book is not dissimilar to the Crowood book on the Sturmovik (below).

     Despite the pleasant cover to the book its contents are far more dated in the visual pleasantries. This means that the photo's are very small! There is vast arrays of text. Thank god I can't read it. There are practically no Photo's in this book that are not available in other books on the topic. So I can not advise anyone to follow my lead and try and obtain a copy of this. It is one for the Sturmovik completist fans only, I am afraid.

     This does not mean that all the foreign language books I own are similar. There are many good books. Often these are in Polish as that country seems quite prolific in churning out high quality reference material on topic.

Most Recently Read:

     Crowood's "Ilyushin Il-2 and Il-10 Shturmovik" is still sitting on my reading pile. It is a great book and you can't get much better than the work of Yefim Gordon and Sergey Komissarov. So far I have trawled through three-quarters of it. A fascinating read although a little dry at times. I mostly got the book for its good references. The pictures are excellent throughout and will prove useful for model-making. When I finally plough through to the end I will post a more lengthy description.