|
Books > History > History of specific subjects > History of specific institutions
The best-known and most important manufacturer of plastic model
kits in the UK, Airfix has been at the forefront of the industry
since 1955 when the first Airfix aircraft kit appeared in UK
branches of Woolworth's. The kits were made to a constant scale and
covered a wide variety of subjects, from aircraft to birds and from
tanks to dinosaurs. In 1981 the famous London-based company closed
down and only the kits survived intact. For the next twenty-five
years Airfix was run by Palitoy and later Humbrol, but suffered
from a lack of investment. In 2006, Hornby Hobbies Ltd, the train
and Scalextric manufacturer, bought the ailing company and
transformed it. Money and resources were ploughed into the range,
and today Airfix releases around twenty new kits per year, designed
to an incredibly high standard. The old kits of the 1950s and 1960s
are gradually being replaced by new state-of-the-art tooling, all
bearing that most prestigious name - Airfix. Published to coincide
with the sixtieth anniversary of the first Airfix aircraft kit,
Sixty Years of Airfix Models, tells the full story, year by year,
of the company and its products.
|
Woodward
(Hardcover)
Deena K Fisher, Robin D Hohweiler
|
R1,026
R822
Discovery Miles 8 220
Save R204 (20%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
Patchogue
(Hardcover)
Steven M Lucas
|
R1,031
R821
Discovery Miles 8 210
Save R210 (20%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie
Babies. With no advertising or big-box distribution, creator Ty
Warner - an eccentric college dropout - become a billionaire in
just three years. And it was all thanks to collectors. The end of
the craze was just as swift and extremely devastating, with "rare"
Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they'd once been
deemed priceless. Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews
(including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products
and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a
Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the most extraordinary
craze of the 1990s.
In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing, Harland Prechel examines how
social structural arrangements that extended corporate property
rights and increased managerial control opened the door for
misconduct and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning
his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market
in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had
become by the end of the century, when the bank and energy sectors
developed political strategies to participate in financial markets.
His account adopts a multilevel approach that considers the
political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded
to answer two questions: how did banks and financial firms
transition from being providers of capital to financial market
actors? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market
participants to engage in high-risk activities? After careful
historical analysis, Prechel examines how organizational and
political-legal arrangements contribute to current record-high
income and wealth inequality, and considers societal preconditions
for change.
|
|