Specialty Press' Collecting Vintage Plastic Model Airplane Kits

'Kit Collector'. That often brings to mind a vision of a 50's+ male with few social skills and questionable hygiene with a house/apartment full of model kits. Like everything else in life, that is an unfortunate stereotype and while there are undoubtedly people like that, most who are into collecting old kits are no different from those who collect other sorts of items or memorabilia. I say memorabilia for that is indeed what dedicated collectors are doing. They are, in many ways, reliving their youth through objects for which they had great fondness and happy memories.

The main topic of this book is not just collecting kit, but collecting vintage kits. By definition, vintage generally means 50 years or older so these are the kits that started the plastic kit hobby. Prior to this, most modelers built flying models, though there was a small segment who spent their time on display models. These were built of wood and those that flew were covered with paper. We can thank the British via FROG for the first injected plastic models (acetate at the time), back in the waning years of the 1930s. 

It wasn't until after WWII and the very early 1950s that polystrene was the way to go for plastic kits. Once the hobby got going, it wasn't long before plastic kit companies sprang up everywhere. In the US, the king of plastic for many, many years was Revell. They produced kits with considerable frequency and often of very current or interesting subjects. Scale was not that much of an issue for many kit makers in the US. It was the British again, with Airfix and FROG who were the ones to be slaves to scale and eventually, everyone else caught on, though it took quite a while.

Kit collectors nowadays have to be fairly wealthy. This is not a hobby for those of us pinching pennies in our hobby. Of the tens of millions of kits produced up to about 1964, only a few tens of thousands still exist and even fewer are in the sort of condition that draws collectors. To pay several hundred or even thousand dollars for an old kit in excellent condition is not all that rare an occurrence.

This book covers the hobby from the viewpoint of those who are immersed in it and want to pass along their knowledge to those who may be interested in the subject. For the rest of us, it is a wealth of images of kits from our youth and many of which we may have only heard or never knew existed. It concentrates on American kit, though there is a section on kits from other parts of the world from this time. I know while reading the book that I frequently said to myself "I built that one and that one and always wanted that one". For those of us who actually want to try building some of these relics, we are fortunate that model companies will, every once in a while, produce a run of these older kits. We can then see that they were not easy to build by modern standards, but entertained us and offered hours of enjoyment when we were kids.

So consider this one, for many, a trip down memory lane. For others a look back at what the hobby used to be like and for still others a chance to look in the basement or attic to see if any of these still exist. It is a book that I enjoyed reading. It is a nice reference and one that any modeler would find worth picking up.