R. J. Essery

This is one of those books that looks interesting and useful in the bookshop, but turns out to be a whited sepulchre when you get it home. A comprehensive guide to track and signalling arrangements on British railways in the steam era, targeted at modellers, is clearly a sensible idea, and the author, as a former railwayman and experienced fine-scale modeller, is obviously well qualified to write about this subject.

Unfortunately, the result is a mess of jumbled text squashed into the gaps between illustrations. Structurally, and in design terms, it's a disaster. The author has apparently been given free rein, so there are long excursions into the detail of matters unlikely to be of more than academic interest to the modeller (e.g. early nineteenth century rail profiles and fixings), whilst areas that are clearly of interest (e.g. track geometry, signal placement) are skated over rather cursorily. The author adopts the offensively pedantic tone that used to be the norm for British amateur experts thirty years ago: he clearly sees himself in the vanguard of the War on Error. Illustration captions are often allowed to become ludicrously long, pushing the main text into odd corners, while the designer has obviously been briefed to keep the number of pages down and avoid white space at all costs. The only sane interpretation of the design concept is that Ian Allan are convinced that no-one buying this book will attempt to read it, so they can leave the text entirely to the author. This is a shame: with a bit of professional editing and guidance, Mr Essery could certainly have produced an interesting book that would be of real benefit to modellers: as it is, we are left with little more than a selection of pretty pictures.

If this were a self-published book, I would rate it more highly, but from a serious, well-established publisher with a track record of producing useful, well-designed books over many years it is very disappointing indeed. Ian Allan evidently need to go out and find a few competent editors and designers.… (altro)