Sarah Herman

I picked up this book just because of the quirky drawings which on first glance appeared to be minimalistic, in fact, too preschool-ish to be an actual published book. But I was in for a surprise! These line drawings effectively convey some rather profound philosophical and profound thoughts about life through the apparently mundane office life of the protagonist.

This book provides a more in depth history of The Lego Company than many of the other Lego books produced by The Lego Company itself. However, the book has a few editing problems and is somewhat disorganized. The long chapters (some as many as 100 pages), make it difficult to read and keep the information in your mind. There is a lot of great information in here, and I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about Lego history.

The history of the Lego group stretches right back to 1932 when the Ole Kirk starts a company producing wooden toys. A couple of years later he changes the name to Lego, meaning I put together, in Latin, but he was not aware of it at the time.

The wooden toys were reasonably successful, and they continued to sell wooden toys up until 1947 when they took the bold step of investing in new plastic moulding technology. They took the chance and spent a fortune on a tool for a model tractor and show more sold them as complete and as a kit. As the investment paid off they started to look at other opportunities and decided to make some basic bricks. Other manufacturers were also making bricks and one was making interlocking bricks too. Legos first bricks were produced in 1949, but they were not really well made. The break through came in the fifties when the stud and tube method of fixing the bricks together was developed.

herman goes onto to detail the evolution of the Lego products, from the basic sets, the invention of the Lego wheel, the massively popular miniature figures and the more modern toys and new technologies like Mindstorms. There is lots of the success of the company, and details on the near financial collapse.

It is a very comprehensive book, but because of that it does get a little bit tedious after a while. Whilst a chronology of the different types of sets is probably interesting to some, I didn't find it that interesting. It would have been better to separate these sections. Ended up skimming it in the end. show less

If you want to be the life of the party, this is your book. You can fill your brain with as much “useless knowledge” (my affectionate moniker) as you can fit and impress people with how fast a sand dune can move, explain what watermelon snow is, and give in morbid detail why a barbershop pole is red and white.

See my complete review at The Eclectic Review .