Heinkel He 111: An Illustrated History. Design - Development - Variants - Operations - Equipment

[Nick Beale]

I wouldn't disagree in the least about the choices an author makes in what he/she chooses to emphasise. I haven't seen the He 111 book, I was merely arguing that simple questions of profitability may well stand in the way of publishing something approaching an "ideal" book on a given subject, especially a multi-volume series. Readers do seem to prefer fighters to bombers or reconnaissance types, the first jets do exert a fascination and the result is that you get multi-volume studies of the Me 262 and Fw 190. I don't know whether or not Ian Allen would have made money by commissioning multiple volumes on the He 111 — and nor does anyone else here, we only have opinions — but how many of us would risk thousands of pounds of our own money trying to prove them wrong?

"Thus the book should have been 'He 111 - An Illustrated Study: Design and Development'." Unless you wanted to sell a copy to me, in which case it should have been "He 111 — An Operational History." Neither of us is "right" about this, we simply have different tastes in books. I've said this before but if Jukka or anyone else thinks there is a market for a deeply technical book on any aircraft, then waiting for someone else to write or publish it hasn't been particularly fruitful up until now.

As for Jukka's comment that "it would be quite perverse to have the best known Spitfire or Lancaster book to be written by German authors" — on the other hand it could be quite refreshing, couldn't it? It would depend entirely on what perspective such an author could bring to the subject.