I don't think I'm a book collector, although Christy might disagree. At least I'm not a book collector in the strict sense of the word. I certainly do buy pretty much any recent book on warfare in the Ancient World, but not all of them, not without seeing them first and some consideration for our poor creaking bookcases.

The first exception I make is for books about Roman naval warfare. There are certainly more books to be had (Jal, La Flotte de César springs to mind and the new book on the Roman Republican navy by Christa Steinby), but I've got some odd ones already. An interesting find a few years ago was Manfred Beike, Kriegsflotten und Seekriege der Antike, published by the Militärverlag der DDR (ie the Military publishing house of East Germany). If you're interested, I see there are lots of copies available from (online) second-hand bookstores.

The second exception is for older modelling and wargaming books. Sure, I buy more modern ones, like the Osprey Masterclass series - I'm a sucker for a book with lots of good pictures of wonderful miniatures - but I especially like older books, from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Plenty of techniques and inventive tricks for making good models and conversions to interest me and a good dollop of nostalgia. At least, I suppose that's why I still love The encyclopedia of Military Modelling by Vic Smeed and Alex Gee. I see on Amazon that it's now been republished, but I found my copy in the late eighties in De Slegte in Arnhem and read it front to back and back to front. By modern standards the models aren't very good, but it was the perfect way to inspire and teach me.

The reason why I write this blog today, is that this morning I had to get a hair-cut, like you do, sometimes anyway. I was about to park my bike at the barber shop window, when I decided that looked too sloppy. So I turned around and parked among some other bicycles standing in a row next to a second-hand bookstore. I took out the key, turned around and found myself looking right at Tarleton's Dragoon to the right.

Having had my haircut and the obligatory "what did you do over Christmas"-talk with the barber, I went to the bookstore, asked to see it and having established that it wasn't a different version of another book, I bought it. Yay, another book for the collection!

Oh...maybe I am a collector after all?