Where to buy books

Dated: May 22, 2002.

A contribution from Mr. David Carlson of USA.

"The best place I've found to buy new books is alldirect.com. They sell almost everything including Ospreys. They have the best prices I've found, and shipping and handling is pretty cheap. I use them for military books and fiction. They don't have the bestest search engine, but once you find the ISBN or exact name or title, say from the publisher or some other site, you can plug it in and get the book. The thing I like best about them is they don't track you, send you spam or junk mail, consider your name and information an asset of their company to sell or even keep your credit card information on file. I've bought about 40 books from them and have found them to be reliable in each case.

The best place I find for second hand and out of print books is abebooks.com. They are not a bookseller, but rather a book search service which lets you search for old books from thousands of booksellers from around the world. Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com does the same thing, but they charge more than ABE. I've often found the same books from the 3 search engines and ABE is always the cheapest because they charge less to list the book. I've found ABE itself to be reliable but you should make sure that the bookseller itself is reliable. I do that by calling up the bookstore when I find the book to make sure they have a live person there and answer the phone with the bookstore's name and are not a fly by night operation. ABE now also has French and German sites.

The other place to buy second hand books is e-bay. You can get some really good deals there but I've also been in bidding wars that cost me more than I've wanted to pay. E-bay provides customer feedback to check for reliability of the seller. Your credit card will also protect you in the event that you don't get your book, as with buying anything else.

I don't work for any of the above places, but I thought I'd pass them on as a tip from one collector to another. If you find something better, let me know ;-)"


I've been buying books on the Imperial Guard and this book is by far the most comprehensive. Call me stupid but I've never been fully able to understand the organisation of the Guard until I got this book. The organisation is explained in pictorials and there are hundreds of pictures like the one shown below. It's very new so you might not be able to find it in all the bookstores.


This is a picture of a Young Guardsman at Waterloo. Actual height of the drawings are about 4 inches or 10 cm.


This is one of the earlier ones I got. I get most of the Ospreys because there are not that many other military publishers as prolific as they are. You might consider them the Cliff notes of military books. And it's true in this case because 64 pages and 12 color plates just isn't enough to cover the Guard.


These is one from a series of re-enactment books. Quite useful if the specific uniform you want is depicted because it doesn't get better than real life, full color. Very good for details of minutae and your next Halloween.


Just threw this one in because it is the best overall single book for Waterloo. The Guard rates 8 pages here and it tells you the numbers of each unit and their actual dress on the day of the big event."

Many thanks to Mr. Carlson.

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