The LEGO Adventure Book
-
The LEGO Adventure Book
Posted by Huw, 07 Nov 2012 09:29. Filed under Book review.
The LEGO Adventure book, written by Megan Rothrock and published by No Starch Press has been highly anticipated since first announced a few months ago. I received a copy today to review ahead of publication, so read onto find out that it’s like and what I thought of it.It’s a hardback book and printed on high quality paper. Its 200 pages are full colour throughout.
The premise behind the book is that a minifig representation of the author (Megs) builds a home base and transportation (in chapter 1), along with a companion (a small robot) then travels around the world visiting MOCs and their builder’s minifig representations, which are mostly shown in a photo-strip like presentation. It is therefore an unconventional approach and not exactly what I was expecting, but it does seem to work and prevents the book from becoming a dry read.
Each of the remaining 13 chapters of the book feature a particular builder and a selection of their MOCs. They usually focus on one theme, for example Mecha by Mark Stafford (Nabii), Friends by Katie Walker (Eilonwy77) and my favourite chapter of the book (because I love brick-built animals), ‘Triassic park’ (dinosaurs) by Mike Psiaki.This photo shows an inspiration page from the 'From below' chapter by nolnet.
Within each chapter there is usually some photo-strip interaction between Megs, the MOC builder and their models, lavish photos of their MOCs for building inspiration and also instructions for building one or more of the models, or to illustrate specific techniques (such as, in the case of Eilonwy77, her excellent cheese slope mosaics).The instructions are presented as photographs and are generally well done and would be easy to follow, as you can see from this Mecha leg page, part of Nabii's contribution to the book. There are exceptions, though. I would say building Carl Greatrix’s tank engine would be nigh-on impossible from the photos provided to all but the most advanced builder. Unfortunately the cool mining truck on the cover is not one of the 25 brick-by-brick instructions that are provided.
This is a fun book to flip through. You will want to build the models and the techniques illustrated will provide inspiration for your own models. I’m certainly going to have a go at Psiaki’s Stegosaurus!
I don’t really have any major criticism of the book: it’s unexpectedly different to other ‘building inspiration’ books and better for it. The only comment I would make is that I would have liked a page at the start of the book, before launching into the home base building, which explained who Megs (the minifig) was and what she was going to be doing throughout the rest of the book. (Update: it turns out there is a brief introduction on the title page which I completely missed.)
If, like me, you’re an aficionado of LEGO books you will want this in your collection. With so many other excellent LEGO books out at the moment I guess the only question prospective buyers will have to ask themselves is whether they can afford them all.
In addition to the photos above you’ll find a lot more in the flickr group dedicated to the book.
You can order it now from Amazon. It's out in the USA already and will be available in the UK at the end of the month.
14 comments, latest one posted 6 months ago. (Commenting has ended on this article)3213 views
