Sadly no longer with us, this is a cautionary tale from 'Sanguin' on BM. Probably too late for me. Regular visitors here will know that my build/completion rate fell off a cliff last year..mostly due to books and 'research'. This year I'm not buying (or writing) books and trying to build some kits instead..
" ...Books can be very helpful and informative, but may also be counter-productive. The following tale is true, the folly of a man who began with Airfix in the 1950s and probably has never properly grown up. Personally I began to be interested in a theme of building kits of Swedish aviation in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Before that it was random Airfix/Matchbox/Frog etc. In Britain I was a minority of a minority of a minority. Magazines sometimes covered the Draken. Lansen and later the Viggen but little else. Correspondence with Swedish people was by post and I used something called 'International Reply Coupons' to pay for their return postage so they would write back to me. I rarely ever got a response, not even to polite requests for information from the Air attache of the Swedish Embassy in London. This was along time ago.... Heller made kits of four SAAB aircraft but that was about it. An Airfix Draken that was rather crude. A Matchbox J29. Malformed Canberras, Catalinas, C-47s., the odd Junkers and a vacform or two. It was only through IPMS UK and Ted Burnett that we later formed the Swedish Airforce Special Interest Group and gained both a membership and a degree of respectability.
I write this as a warning. When you know little, you have fewer options to attain authenticity or realism or whatever you seek by making a decent replica. The quest for making the best can become self defeating. Over the years my hobby switched from making a few models, mainly fairly mediocre but some were good enough for a club stand, to amassing a collection of kits and books.
Before the internet and websites it was just magazines and a limited range of books that were our main sources of information. As publishers sought authors who could plough the soil of history to turn up the stories that were unknown to us, we enjoyed discovering the range of things that we could replicate expand beyond our wildest dreams. There were books with decent illustrations, better paper and much more information, histories of airfields, squadrons, aircraft in their many versions, colour schemes and markings and covering a huge range of aviation.
Suddenly my obsession (which it was in many ways) with things Swedish was diluted with learning about Air-Sea Rescue from Hawkinge in Kent, then 500 (County of Kent) Squadron, then the test/development aircraft flown at Farnborough/ Boscombe Down and so it went on.....the development of the Spitfire, captured aircraft in enemy markings, personal aircraft flown by senior officers, aviation oddities. I had a large and expanding library, a loft full of kits to match and neither the time nor inclination to build anything because I wasn't that good anymore. My standards were reduced by cataracts, dodgy vision in general, a chronic lack of time and a fear of having a lot more knowledge than skill. Even retirement increased my book collection but local community stuff replaced my meagre attempts at finishing builds.
This is a confessional, really. And not a proud one either. My lungs are seriously damaged by ciggies and pneumonia and my life expectancy is now very short. So in the last year I have sold it all. There is no way I could leave that lot for my wife to sort and get rid of. Books, kits, decals, resin and white metal, the whole lot. I sold it all (well, there are a few kits stashed away, either part-built or just of interest to me, less than 20.....honest). Had I built all that I had stashed away then we would have had to live in the garden shed. It was ridiculous.
So books are a useful addition to your knowledge, but they can become a diversion, an opportunity to vastly expand your knowledge but possibly at the expense of actually building models. Like everything in this life, you have to control what you do and 'moderation in all things' is perhaps the maxim to follow. Had I stayed with just the Swedish stuff, I could have binned all of my model collection a few years back and started again on more modern (but not always better) Swedish kits that have appeared and probably spent more money on beer and family and friends. This confessional may have bored many of you, amused a few and perhaps reflected something of the obsession that we have all had in differing degrees but it is how my relaxing hobby turned into something more. It may be that for some of us a surfeit of knowledge is a dangerous thing..."
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