Great LEGO® Sets A Visual History: With Exclusive Micro-Scale Space Cruiser Hardcover – 1 October 2015

Fantastic book for Lego Collectors. Will leave you asking which of the featured sets you have, and which you need to acquire ;)

Beautiful book, with great information. Makes a great buy for a Lego fan of any age. The micro build included is a very cute one too.

Una delizia per gli occhi e per le mani con la riproduzione in scala del vecchio jet lego space...

Wundervolles Buch zum Schmökern.Ich bin Jahrgang 1987 und hier wird man richtig schön in die Vergangenheit zurückversetzt.Ich schaue es immer wieder gerne an und erinnere mich an die Sets, die ich nie bekommen habe :-)Das beiliegende Set gefällt mir jedoch nicht, aber das ist Nebensache.

I love all the Lego books. This one is no exception. Buy it!! 😃

What you’re actually getting here is three things – the book, a book-sized cardboard box containing the pieces for the mini Cruiser (more on that later) and a hard cardboard sleeve that houses both. The whole package is bigger and heavier than I was expecting and reeks of quality, from the thick cardboard covers of the book to the glossy photos covering the sides of both the book and the sleeve; this is not your typical newsagent LEGO magazine, by any stretch of the imagination, and even looks good just sitting on the shelf.Unlike some LEGO publications, the book here is has received input from both Brickset.com and The LEGO Group, with a foreword by Jette Orduna (Director at The LEGO Idea House), and the group’s input shows. It has 256 pages comprising a mix of striking, glossy photos with snippets of information around them on what the authors consider to be some of LEGO’s greatest sets from every decade. Some might say that it is, as such, a subjective read; fortunately, many of the authors’ ‘greatest’ sets are some that I consider to be amongst LEGO’s finest, so it’s not a problem for me, but in any event it’s so jam-packed with sets that you’re almost sure to find photos and detail on at least a bunch that you remember from your childhood (or later.)Some of the sets – the fantastic LL928 Classic Space set, for example – are given two adjacent pages, whilst some take up only a portion of a single page. Much of the information is pretty general stuff, like how often a particular piece is used or what features a set has, but some is much more specific, such as which particular sets are meant to be combined and who designed what sections of each and why. There are also various boxes dotted around, giving quotes from the actual designers and marketers of the sets, although these mainly feature on sets from the 1980’s onwards. It’s also written in ‘proper’ (not American) English, although the names of some of the sets seem to be taken from the US or European lines rather than the UK one.The photos themselves are very high quality and look to be recently taken rather than vintage reproductions – this is a feat in itself given the age and rarity of some of the sets pictured, even more so when you consider that they appear as-new. If you really break it down, what you have here is a something similar to a photographer’s portfolio book, with a ratio that I would say is made up of 65% photos and 35% writing.The book is broken up mainly into sections by decade, from the 1950’s up to 2015, with each section being separated into sub-sections by genre (space, town, castle, Star Wars, etc.) There are also a few specific sections that detail, for example, LEGO spaceships or pirate ships from every era. Whether you’re a fan of the ground-breaking sets of the 70’s and 80’s, or the feature-packed ones of the 90’s and 2000’s, there’s bound to be something here that will interest you. At the front of the book is a nice piece on how a LEGO set is made, from inception to design and then to manufacture; you can most likely find this information on the internet, but having it here, with photos of some of the people responsible, brings the process more to life.The one area that doesn’t feature very heavily is Technic, one of my favourite genres. There are a few photos and information snippets spread about the book in various decade sections, but these are relatively few and far between given how influential Technic has been. Classic Space and its contemporaries does feature pretty well, which kind of makes up for it, but the omission of a section specifically for Technic when other, arguably less successful, efforts from LEGO’s history appear quite a bit does grate somewhat.As I mentioned, with the book you also get a cardboard box that contains an official LEGO polybag with 102 pieces and instructions for the 11910 mini Space Cruiser, a micro-clone of the LL928 – I believe this is the only place you can get this set. I’m a huge fan of the original and it seems that I’m not alone, for The LEGO Group to produce a scaled-down version of it for – almost – general release. The set is pretty tiny, as you’d expect, but it does contain a surprising amount of functionality, including opening rear doors and lowering ramp, like on the classic Cruiser. Of course, it gets dwarfed by the bad-boy original, but you can tell straight away what it’s meant to represent. You don’t get any exclusive minifigs with the book, which I would have liked, but I’d rather have the mini Cruiser anyway.If you aren’t really into photos (or nostalgia), this book almost certainly isn’t for you, especially considering that one of its main selling points is the micro LL928 set. I love photos, nostalgia AND the LL928, so getting this was a no-brainer for me, but even I was surprised at just how well the whole package is presented; in fact, it would have been a good purchase even without the Cruiser. Some may say that it doesn’t have enough detail on what they consider to be their favourite sets, but I still think it’s worth the price of admission for the nostalgia trip alone; I’m not afraid to admit that I was grinning from ear to ear when I flicked through it.

My son loved it