Thanks to Casemate Publishing & IPMSUSA for the review copy!

Kagero Publishing continues to illustrate obscure ships in exacting CG 3D detail with their characteristic dark blue background. This time the first German Imperial Navy battleships – the Brandenberg class – is the subject. This book is a softbound European A4 size (8 ¼ by 1111/16 inches) with only English language (instead of English and Polish) –probably because the author was Greek. Tassos Katsikas is a 3D Content Designer, Image Editor for Radnet and graduated from the Anotati Scholi Kalon Technon, a higher education institution in Athens, Greece.

Based out of Austria, Harpia Publishing specializes in the more esoteric aspects of military aviation, and boasts some of the most knowledgeable authors in their respective fields. The result is a catalog of books with very detailed accounts of Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Asian, and various African air forces.

This book covers the history of toy and model soldiers for the last 2,500 years of human civilization. That is not a minor feat, considering that human civilization is about 6,000-year-old.

The book describes the religious and martial uses of scale toys in the past and how the model soldier became a toy in the late 1800s through the mid-1950 and a collectible in the 21st century. It includes the evolution from paper, to tin, to alloys and finally to plastic.

It also has a few chapters (listed as “Cameo”) where collectors tell very personal stories of how they got interested in toy soldiers, why they collect them and what aspect of collecting them gives them the most pleasure (it could be going “hunting” to an open market for that rare find or how the old memory of a dime-store gets triggered by holding a given figure).