Hi Dave - a fair question, and the answer is : Because we have been asked to reprint it by a number of customers - they want to be able to buy these titles. Whilst some of our titles do miss out on the latest research, that is really unavoidable - we have been publishing books for over 40 years so inevitably some of our books are decades old. As much as we would love to do it, rewriting books is not something which we realistically do - especially with the huge variety of new subjects that we are asked to publish books on. Every month over 1000 different titles are entered into our Books You Would Like To Read section, and if we were to go back and update 1000s of our previous books, we simply wouldn't even be able to consider doing anything new.
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Does anyone have an idea if the Victorian titles pertaining to the Northwest frontier and Victoria's enemies will be reprinted?
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I have been collecting Osprey titles since 1969 when I was 12 years old (I am now 52). I now have over a thousand titles covering military, aviation, history, and transportation subjects. I support the reprint program since it provides an opportunity to replace copies that have become worn through use or to add titles that one may be missing. In rebuttal to the question about the contents of the titles reprinted, the question of their validity applies equally to sources on the net, and only an Osprey book has illustrations by Angus McBride, Gerry Embelton, Richard Hook, Adam Hook, Mike Chappel, and the other past and current Osprey artists.
Ellis Estes
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I assumed books were re-written. It is a bit dissappointing to find out they are not as a matter of course.
I picked up an Osprey book on the HIP helicopter written in the eightis. The technical information on the helicopter was quite blury as the then WARSAW PACT countries were not forth coming sharing secrets of their military hardware with western capitalist book publishers.
Does this mean in 20 years time Osprey readers will still be none the wiser?
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Hi there – sometimes we publish revised editions of our books but on the whole our reprints are essentially the same as the existing book. Unfortunately we are not able to revise all of our existing titles alongside producing new ones – our back catalogue is simply too extensive and we are working extremely hard to try and get all of our books back into print. Thank you for your comment though, we can look into revising certain books.
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Hello - Is there any way to know in advance when a particular title might be reprinted? I'd love to get a copy of Montcalm's Army, MAA 23. Thank you.
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If there was any Osprey book that should never have been reprinted in its original form it would be MAA 33: US Cavalry which had bizarre errors of fact including "no record of engagements for the War of 1812" (total nonsense & lazy scholarship), the 4th Cavalry being Custer's command at Little Big Horn (even my 3-year old nephew knows it was the 7th), General Wainwright escaping from the Philippines in 1942 (He stood side by side with fellow ex-POW & emaciated skeleton General Percival of the British Army on the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945), the 1861 Sabre being used as a bayonet (sword/sabre bayonets existed for infantry rifles,if anyone can fix a M1861 sabre to a carbine they can have my 600 Osprey books & a month's pay) as well as illustrating uniforms in the plates that never existed including an 1812-15 US Light Dragoon colonel wearing grey & a 1861-65 Union bugler in what looks like a "reversed colors" musician's uniform but was passing out of use in period armies & no longer US Regulation for some years previous.
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