This should have been a lovely second-hand book - as a teenager, I had a subsequent edition and was pleased to source this first edition. Illustrations are almost full page and on every other page but the publisher really did let the book buyer down - a good number of the photographs are reproduced with either the bow or stern of the subject ship missing and, in one case, on page 151, the photograph of HMS Norman disappears off the page, slicing through the pennant number G49. I'd have taken the book back for a full refund! Caveat emptor. Nevertheless, the volume does give a good picture of the world's navies in the mid-1950s.