Customer Reviews

Lionel's Model Builder: The Magazine That Shaped the Toy Train Hobby

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This great book is filled with nostalgia. See how the guys did it in the old days! It even had an article and photos by Frank Ellison. You're sure to enjoy this look into the past.

Save your money -- this one is well below the usual Kalmbach standards. While the opening essay on the birth, life and end of Model Builder magazine and its editor is fine, the rest of book is a slew of poorly reproduced articles from old issues of the magazine itself. Too many of these reprinted pages have photos that are very dark or muddy (especially in the second half of the book), other pages are reproduced so small they're unreadable. Several reprinted articles are truncated, so you can't even read the full text of the original. There's no index, bibliography, or even a list of contents of Model Builder issues. To cap it off, there's an incredibly self-serving reprint about another magazine entirely -- Model Railroader -- that has nothing to do with Lionel: it's a complete waste of space in what is already a thin and expensive little publication.