Having dissected the ‘owl pellet’ of Tony Adams’ 1960s Airfix gaming figures in my recent blog posts, I thought I would share with you some of the Airfix reference materials that I have used alongside online websites like Plastic Soldier Review to date these version 1 figures.
This is not my only vintage hoard or kind gift from older colleagues and acquaintances. 2017 was a lucky year for vintage Airfix:
https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/another-vintage-airfix-hoard/
https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/08/vintage-airfix-tin-hoard/
Before I start chasing older packaging – one attractive and useful book that I mentioned in a previous post was Jean-Christophe Carbonel’s 2010 book Airfix’s Little Soldiers (translated from French, 2010).
This book alone has saved me a small fortune collecting early Airfix packaging and playsets that I don’t have the storage space or money for.
Arthur Ward, ex Tailgunner columnist of Airfix magazine, has produced several Airfix and kit company history books. These are a good rainy day, loose end sort of book to read with attractive figures pictures to inspire you!
Best of all, I have the odd scrappy Airfix catalogue from my youth like this 1982 one to remind me. Too many of my teenage years, high on paint and kit glue in small unventilated rooms, were spent happily looking at these pages.
These pages recall many happy hours planning how many boxes of figures I would need and how to convert them, then working out if I could afford them. These pages also remind me that being shown in a catalogue didn’t necessarily mean these figures were available in the shop. The usual Airfix feast or famine, boom and bust.
No wonder, almost forty years on from this catalogue, I still have to restrain myself from impulse buying and hoarding Airfix figures whenever I see certain boxes. There should be an AA, an Airfix Anonymous for men of a certain age for such occasions : “My name is Mark Man of TIN and I am a vintage Airfix addict. I am resisting the need for my next Air-Fix (although I did buy the new version WW2 British Infantry a few weeks ago and it felt good.)”
Still a uniform reference guide for me years later, this catalogue is what the different troops of history should look like. As the BBC say for balance, other figure manufacturers are available. (Admit it though, they’re just not the same.)
There, a quick bit of weekend Airfix nostalgia, decades in the making!
The gateway to plastic happiness is still available by post erratically stocked in part (and currently in OO scale only) at
https://www.airfix.com/uk-en/shop/figures.html
Blog posted by Mark, Man of TIN (and Airfix Kid of Plastic) 7 September 2019.
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