Haynes - 57 varieties???

The Haynes Owner's Workshop Manuals are a bit of a British staple. From 1960 onwards, there were manuals printed for pretty much every mainstream car in the UK. A few years ago, Haynes branched out from the car market and started producing manuals for everything else. Ignoring the Alien Invasion and Zombie Apocalypse ones, what caught my interest were the Manuals for aircraft, ships and military vehicles.

Just a few of the many available

With a retail price of £25.00, this could be seen as quite expensive but they are quite common in remainder book shops like The Works and you can get them quite cheaply on Amazon. Most of the above cost me £6 a piece!

They follow the same format, a history of the subject, then a technical description covering design, weapons, propulsion and  the like, specialist versions and then a service history. What makes these books an excellent source is that whilst all of the information contained within them is already public knowledge, it's the way they place all of that information in one volume. It helps that the authors of each volume are experienced in their field - the Chieftain and Challenger 2 editions, for instance, are written by a gentleman who served twenty years in the British Army and used and commanded such vehicles in service. These are not the be all and end all of their respective topics by any means, but they include decent bibliographies for further reading and a wealth of illustrations and photographs. Indeed, if you're a modeler or wargamer who wants to put some realistic kit on the table, you'll find a lot of detail in these books that will make your efforts that much better.

In a sense, these are similar to Ospreys, and can be considered a good introduction to their respective topics. The advantage the Haynes volumes have is that they are more detailed, have much better imagery and can be found (outside of war games shows), a bit cheaper than Ospreys.