Gloster Gladiator Aces Book

This book must've taken forever to research, with so many archival photos and such a vast bibliography at the back. It may be only a short book of 90 pages, but the information is very densely packed and tightly laid out. Consequently, this is a great book for researchers of these particular planes, pilots, squadrons and battles, but less accessible to the average reader, making for stodgy, hard-going text. The verbatim quotations from flying logs and pilots makes for particularly interesting reading, but understandably, during these and the rest of the body text from the outset, enemy aircraft are named as CR42s, S79s, Ca133s and G50s, so unless the reader has a copy of Jane's on their bedside table, they are unlikely to know them all by heart. Some kind of reference page would've been a useful addition, as would a small map here and there for the less-familiar parts of British Somaliland and the Northern Finland-Russian border. The colour plates are beautifully drawn, but the information that pertains to them is 40 pages away, which seems oddly inconvenient. Typos are not rare either - there is even one on the back cover. I wanted to like this more than I did, but it is a valuable reference book to the right audience. 3.25/5