Matchbox Toys 1947-2003 by Dana Johnson (2004, Paperback)

Very helpful in identifing and getting approximate value of vehicles. I have used it quite a bit since receiving.

Purchased Matchbox toy book 1947 -2003 and tried to leave very positive feed but e bay would not allow as said " ffed back had alread been left" and believe because there was more than one at the great price.Received excellent service, and fast delivery. Could not beat the purchase price from anyone else. Was so pleased, I purchased a second book from the same vendor massbookstore-online and received the same great service. Book was in great condition, will purchase books again from massbookstore-online.

I have an older version of this that I liked but the new one is even better. When I went to buy this Guide, I saw that it was beat up in the reveiws and another, similar book had great reveiws, so I bought both, I prefer this one by far. It has many variations, and alot of pictures, maybe not every one but far more than the other that I bought.

I recently was given 100+ Lesney Matchbox diecast toys from my brother-in-law to assess their value. Not knowing anything about these cars, or any other collectable, I needed a good reference book. Shopped around and found quite a few but they focused on certain years or type of dicast, etc.,. What I wanted was one that had all of these aspects in one volume and I found it. This reference is it. Out of the100+ diecasts (1951- 1970s) I was able to ID all but one. The organization of the book at first seemed not to have much order to it but after the first hour it clicked in and I found it arranged in a very intuitive and user friendly lay out. After finding the model looking for there is a break down into subcategories, type of paint, wheel color, etc., with suggested values. The color photographs, the Guide to determining values, and History made this a great reference for me. The book states in the preface to be "the most useful and user-friendly" reference on Matchbox toys and ends with "But I'll let you decide". Well, I have decided and I could not agree more. This is an excellent reference book by Dana Johnson and I highly recommend it.

I thought as a reference guide there would be more pictures. This is probably a good book if you know a lot about the cars, but for the beginning collector I thought it was disorganized. If you know the particular series and possibly model numbers of the cars it's easy to quickly come up with a value, but somebody with little knowledge of the cars is going to get confused very quickly. The lack of pictures of the older cars also made it frustrating for me.

A little hard to follow in some instances.No really complete index.Would refer to a certain listing and then there would be no follow up.But,still contains a good deal of information.