O. S. Nock. The Triang-Hornby Book of Trains. (Ca. 1966)

     O. S. Nock. The Triang-Hornby Book of Trains. (Ca. 1966) Another of Nock’s potboilers, and apart from a cursory but interesting enough survey of railways in the mid-60s, merely a listing of Triang’s stuff - which was pretty awful. Nock, obviously well-paid to be a shill, overstates the quality of the terrible products produced by Triang, which in fact cheapened the Hornby material they absorbed with that company. Thus, the book turns out to be an unwittingly instructive example of all that was wrong with British manufacture after the war. The owners understood neither the rapidly rising quality of their competition’s products, nor the even faster increase in consumer awareness of that quality, which resulted in a more or less disdainful rejection of inferior goods. * (2006)