In the Focus On Lesser Known Suppliers section we take a look at some of the lesser known manufacturers and suppliers that are out there serving the modelling world. These manufacturers and suppliers are ones we feel offer something that benefits modellers but who may not be as well known as they deserve to be. This section is NOT paid advertorials, for a manufacturer to be here means I personally felt that their product is worthy of spreading the word. Often I will use info supplied by them for background, future intent, etc but I won’t endorse something I don’t personally believe in.
www.oliverpublishinggroup.com
Today we’re taking a look at The Oliver Publishing Group, a book publisher based in Australia who provide a high quality range of reference books on armour who began trading as The Oliver Publishing Group in May of 2009 when they broke with The Factory Publishing ( themselves a publisher of armour related books ).
Since breaking away they have released 4 titles and have another in the final stages of completion which will be released this month. All these books are A4 size and made up of 36 pages including the front and back covers, and currently belong to one of 4 series :
Under The Gun
This series uses photos of disabled or captured vehicles. Panzers in the Bocage : German Armour in the Battles For Normandy was Oliver Publishing Group’s first independent title and the first in this series and will be followed up this month by First Blood, focusing on the U.S. 1st Armoured Division in Tunisia.
Combat Camera
This series is very “photo heavy” with many being taken by ordinary soldiers rather than the authorised – and often sanitised – versions from official photographers. Onslaught : The German Invasion Of Soviet Russia was the second of this series ( although it was ready for printing first ) and was made up entirely of “photo-snaps” taken by German soldiers during the invasion of Russia. The Cromwell and Centaur : British Cruiser Tanks in NWE book was something of a break from the basic philosophy of this category but due to having so many photos ( the author being the Curator of the IWM photo archive) that it was hard for them to know where else to put it. Both these titles only included a single page of colour artwork but due to requests for more all future books in this series will contain 4 centre pages and the outside back cover in colour as a minimum.
In Colour
These books feature mostly colour illustrations with only a few photos and a small amount of text and so far To The Last Bullet : Germany’s War On 3 Fronts. Part 1 : The East, the first book in this series, has been their most successful title. That book features 25 pages of colour artwork, text, black and white archive photos - most never seen before – maps and organisational charts.
Battleline
No books have yet been released in this series but they will have a high narrative content as well as colour artwork. Long Road To Victory, the first of the Desert Rats trilogy, is expected to be the first book released in this series.
As far as upcoming projects go they have a number of books planned for 2011 including the next part of To The Last Bullet, another mainly artwork book on British and Commonwealth Shermans in Italy, more titles from Claude Gillono including a
Combat camera book on the Panzer III in North Africa and French tanks of 1940 and several titles on British Armoured units in North-West Europe. As with previous titles they will be trying to arrange with decal – and from next year possibly model – manufacturers to release products based on the artwork in these books.
I have a couple of their books and I can say unequivocally that the quality and content is superb, and the possibility of the artworks being translated into decal sheets is in my opinion a great bonus as I find the colour reference plates in these books to offer some great build ideas. I also particularly like the large unit insignia images that are included on the colour plates. In the next couple of weeks I’ll get up reviews of the ones I have but if like me you’re the sort of builder who likes to know who had what, where, and when and what they looked like at the time then these, and especially so the In Colour series, are an excellent resource for covering those simple basics that allow you to feel happy that you’ve set your model in an historically correct setting. Obviously in 36 pages you’re not going to cover every unit in every theatre but what you do get is still a heap of useful information.
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