Crewe Alex skrev:...what they write about it at slotcaracademy.com...
The book gives an excellent overview of all models that
have been produced in the European countries.
No doubt a substantial effort by Mr Rampini an in many ways also somewhat interesting.
But an ”excellent overview”?
Sorry, but: Nope. Non. Nein. Njet. Nix.
This book is (sadly
) a too easy target even for the nit-picker, not very instrumental in the approach and by no means as comprehensive as the title suggests.
Pro primo (to speak in Mr Rampini's tongue), all of the text information in the book about the different brands is written in italian, and in italian only, in spite of the brave title in english. Why the title of an all-italian book is written in english one can only speculate, but my guess is to help sales of the (rather expensive — 75 euro) book in other places than inside Italy... A classic confidence trick.
Pro secundo, the content of the book is very far from being as comprehensive as the cover promises.
Connecting to the title of this thread,
Dansk Modelflyve Industri — Elmodan is nowhere to be found in the book, but as far as I'm concerned Denmark was within the boundries of Europe in the 50 years between 1930 and 1980... And still is.
But DMI-Elmodan is only one example of the shortcomings of Mr Rampini's book. The german
BUB-Autobahn in the previous posting is also missing from the book, as well as the early british brand
Welkut. Another example is
WinnWagen, a quite big brand on the international scene in the early 1980's, with its founding roots in Norway. There are certainly more brands and cars missing.
Also in other respects, the content of the book seems quite haphazardly collected and rudimentary described. This is the book's ”content” of the odd spanish brand
Hermanos Segura:
Paolo Rampini skrev:”Si tratta di una fabbrica Spagnola che produsse alla fine anni sessanta diversi slot cars in plastica di buona qualità.” (This is a Spanish factory that in the late sixties produced several plastic slot cars of good quality.)
OK. And?
Mr Rampini doesn't care to reveal anything more about the Hermanos Segura brand, e.g scale or available models. Only ”buona qualità”. And we're expected to suck it down and shut up...
Pro tertio, more than half of the book's content is pictures of slot cars, and in colour. That sounds great, but the quality of the pics is not always very good, and the pictures are also often not very informative. In many cases just a shot from the side of a group of cars. Often many cars in the group, with each car hard to see and discern, maybe also obscured by another less interesting car... Never a view from beneath to see an interesting chassis or a drivetrain setup solution.
In many cases the pics are also not of cars per se, but mere reproductions from period brand catalogues. E.g.
Scalextric,
Joeuf and
Revell (sic!),
an american brand and not from Europe at all!!!All in all, the intention with this book from Mr Rampini seems not to have been to give a fully covering exposé of the evolution of ”Slotcars made in Europe 1930-1980”, but to merely put his own collection on display to "show-off”. And also make others (including me and Scalex, obviously
) to pay for the production of the showcase...
As the old saying goes: There's a sucker born every minute...