In my isolation on the most remote island in the Pacific Ocean, I found myself painting miniatures again. I am working on some French Dragoons circa 1810. I pulled out my trusty Osprey Men-at-Arms "Napoleon's Dragoons and Lancers" by Emir Bukhari, published in 1976. It is so old it does not even have a Men-at-Arms number and the cover is yellow with age. . . it was probably one of the first 30 Napoleonic books I bought. But I digress. . . So I flip the book over to see how much it cost. . . £1.75. . . which considering what wages were back then, it was not inexpensive. (As a second lieutenant I was making about $1200 a month before taxes.)
I checked the Osprey website and a current Men-at-Arms is £12.
Are you familiar with On Military Matters? I have found it an excellent source of material over the years.
http://onmilitarymatters.com/pages/dfindex.php
This is my first proper look at this admirable forum and it is so good to see many familiar names taking part. My own collecting of books on military uniforms started in my mid-teens and I pounced on the few books available at that time in Britain and have continued ever since, although this tends to be a mainly digital search now. My first treasure was 'Regiments at a glance' by Frank Wilson - mainly for the pictures followed by books by R Money Barnes again for the pictures rather than the script. The first two more scholarly books were WY Carmen's 'Military uniforms from contemporary sources', which still stands up well and Miller and Dawnay's ' Military paintings and drawings in the Royal Collection'. From an uninformed start, an interest in European uniforms was greatly encouraged when I bought for the then enormous sum of £5 the first edition of Anne S K Brown's ' The anatomy of glory' when it first came out followed by and also at a high price Paul Martin's 'Der bunte rock'.
As has been mentioned, abe books can provide bargains and I have also found a good source at Berliner Zinnfiguren.
With my best wishes
Richard Adlington
Edinburgh
Hello, I joined about 20 minutes ago, so forgive me if I make a mistake (or you already know this). I've read the rules and think this is permissable.
I get books from Naval and Military Press here in the UK. They are brand new and eye-wateringly cheap. For example, books from the Naploneonic Library series which retail here at £25 each, can be bought from between £3.99 to £5.99, with P&P on top. I can highly recommend them. Their website is here.
https://www.naval-military-press.com/
I was talking with Donald Horward several months ago and he told he bought 600 books from Ken Trotman back in the 1980s to build the Florida State University Library. Books can be found fairly cheaply on Amazon. . . as Kevin Kiley pointed out there you get a reprint of almost any book that is on Google Books fairly inexpensively.
I remember back in the 1980s when academic monographs (books like Houlding's Fit for Service or Duffy's Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower) hit £45 which was eye-watering at the time; and trade books were often £25 or £30. And all these years later, the monographs have gone up by maybe 50%, while the trade books are the same price or even lower - think of the number of Pen & Sword or Helion titles published at around £20 or £25. Editions are smaller, I think, and technology has helped make short run printing cheaper. Meanwhile the internet (and sites like abebooks) has greatly lowered the price of most secondhand books (driving many secondhand booksellers out of business) while raising the price of rare and sought after books. It is also infinitely easier to get what you want when you want it - I bought hundreds of books, not because I had any immediate use for them, but because I thought I might need them in the future and that I wouldn't then be able to get them. Not that I'm complaining - they are constantly coming into use and hunting for them was great fun.
And let's not discuss the price of books that are older, and hard to find...