Dave's Transformers Guide Rant Warman's Transformers Field Guide Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Artifacts/FieldGuide Found this with the Transformers display at Hastings, a regional media store chain (books, music, DVDs, magazines, and a small toy section). While I already have the entire Cybertronian guide series, I figured I'd pick this up as something to leave at the office or something. Update 10/12/07: I had a really good coupon for Waldenbooks, so grabbed the full price guide by the same author. It has all the pictures I complained about the Field Guide missing, and has pictures shrunk smaller than the Field Guide does, so it was perfectly possible for things like Pretender inner robots to have been included in the Field Guide. CAPSULE Warman's Transformers Field Guide: Decent guide to G1 toys. The price guide part is, of course, almost useless due to the shifting nature of prices. Has some serious deficiencies even as an identification manual, though, even allowing for size limitations. You're better off getting a spare Cybertronian Index if you can find one. $12.99/$15.99Cn RANT Title: Warman's Transformers Field Guide Author: Mark Bellomo Publication Year: 2007 Publisher: Krause Publications (an imprint of F+W Publications) ISBN10: 0-0896890584-X ISBN13: 978-0-89689-584-3 Page Count: 512 Okay, the stated purpose from the back cover: "At last, a guide you can really carry along to flea markets and garage sales, containing hundreds of illustrations and photographs to make on-the-spot appraisals easy." And at a compact brick of 4" (10cm) wide, 5.25" (13cm) tall and 1.25" (3cm) thick, it's certainly more portable than other guides. And, I suppose, even with price guides being out of date before they even hit the printers, an old listing is still a good starting point to see if you're being totally ripped off or getting a major steal. The first thirty-odd pages are a more detailed price guide, with both loose and boxed/carded price ranges for everything released in G1. The last four pages are an index. The remaining 470 pages are given over to photos of every G1 Transformer sold in America. Unfortunately, while they all seem to be in there, not every toy gets the same level of coverage. Some only show one mode, while others get all modes and known variants. A few are shown in box or on card, but most aren't. Most of the mailaways are shown, but the decoys and Minispies (which are total collector bait) are not even mentioned. The coverage is especially weak when it comes to Pretenders. For the overwhelming majority, it only shows the shell, with no pictures of the inner robot in either mode. This makes it pretty useless for the collector who's trying to match shell to inner robot, as they're often found separate at "flea markets and garage sales". Micromasters also get short shrift, with vehicle modes rarely shown, and most bases/trailers only shown in deployed mode. But even some of the "main cast" early G1 toys get lack of attention, such as Trailbreaker shown only in robot mode. Yes, they only have 512 pages to cover all of these toys, but there's a lot of white space on a lot of pages. A slight reduction in size would often let both modes fit on the same page, so I suspect that the missing pictures are more due to the author not having the pictures in the first place. I suppose I could check Bellomo's full-sized guide (also from Krause) to see if the missing pics are there, but I don't really feel like it. After all, I have pictures of the other stuff already, in the various Cybertronian Guides and Index. Okay, for $13 I may be asking for a lot. On the other hand, the author already did take pictures for the bigger guide, so assembling this should have been merely a layout task, and maybe taking a few extra "you might see it in this mode on a flea market table" pictures if the bigger guide was lacking. It should have been better than what was put out. In short, unless you really need a G1 guide and can't afford better, pass on this one. It's only G1, it doesn't cover some of the really hard stuff, and it doesn't have clear accessory pictures to help you figure out if that "mint" toy is really all there. Dave Van Domelen, notes that Cybertronian Index seems to be out of print and hard to find now, but the individual Cybertronian Guide issues are still available on Antarctic's webpage. Too bad that post-BW installments of the Cybertronian Guide are unlikely to be made.