Zap! Raygun Classics Review

Zap! Raygun Classics by Leslie Singer ( San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991) was the first, and is still one of the few, books devoted soley to rayguns. It's primarily a book of photographs which just happens to also contain some useful information of collectors and scholars.

After a brief introduction about the nostalgia of rayguns, Singer delivers a lot of really nice pictures. The book is divided into sections by decade, starting with the 1930s and ending with the 1980s (which seems too recent to be properly vintage to me, but it was longer ago than I'd like to think). Most of the rayguns pictured get a half-page or a whole-page photograph with a small block of text identifying the name of the gun, the manufacturer and location, and the date (often only identified to the decade). Interspersed here and there with the rayguns are related items like robots, badges and vintage graphics.

The photographs are top-notch and the subjects--the rayguns themselves--are not all pristine examples, but often have dings, scratches and other evidence that they were once cherished playthings. The book closes with a brief bibliography (there just aren't that many resources for toy rayguns) and a price list, which is surprisingly accurate for something that's twenty years out of date.

This is a great volume for a coffee-table book. It doesn't really have enough information to make it useful as a reference source (though I've used sparser sources), but it invites flipping through over and over again. It's long out of print, but shouldn't be too difficult to find used.

Click here to buy Zap! Raygun Classics from Amazon.com