This is the first in what is promised to be a new series of aircraft modeling guides, and the chosen subject is the incomparable Avro Vulcan, the best known of Britain’s Cold War “V-Bombers.” Designed for nuclear deterrence but made famous at the end of its career for the “Black Buck” missions against the Argentine invaders in the Falklands War.

Author Geoff Coughlin is well known in British aviation modeling circles and is the founder of the scalemodellingnow.com website. A well-established author and aviation historian, he starts the book with a good but necessarily brief history of the type’s development and service, I think that this would have benefited from being longer, but size restrictions clearly came into play.

This is followed by a profusely illustrated section detailing the key features of the Vulcan and how to create and enhance accuracy of the available kits. As a walkaround, it is somewhat lacking in some areas, and the photos are sometimes too small to be of much use, but the text is very helpful in outlining differences between airframes. A short section of small color side profiles follows, then the meat of the book is a series of build articles of kits ranging from 1/200 to 1/48 scale. A brief gallery of further builds and a concise bibliography conclude the book.

The builds, which include multiple examples of both the old and new Airfix 1/72 scale kits, are all very competently done and will be most useful to anyone building these models. I was especially impressed by Bill Clark’s B.1A conversion from the old Airfix mold; however, it is clear that not all the contributors are experienced writers, and some editing would have been of benefit. The result is some very uneven coverage of the tips and techniques used in the builds. Again, many of the photos included here are too small in my opinion.

In summary, while the content is good, the author is done absolutely no favors by the publishers decision to use such a small (6.75 x 9.75 inches) format for the book. Most, if not all modeling guides, are typically a standard 8.5 x 11 inches textbook size that helps to emphasize the visual elements that are so important to this type of book. Many of the photos are reproduced too small to be of much use, as are the profiles, which would also benefit from being laid out vertically to increase their size, especially for an aircraft as large as the Vulcan.

I would recommend this book to those interested in building the Vulcan bomber but understand that there are some limitations in this publication. While I look forward to seeing what aircraft will be featured in the future, I very much hope that future editions will be in a larger format as I believe that the material deserves it. My thanks to Casemate Publishers for supplying the review sample to IPMS-USA.