Oakwood Press : The first 80 Years 1931-2011

Oakwood Press : The first 80 Years 1931-2011

A Collector's Guide

The main purpose of this book, as well as briefly telling the story of Oakwood Press, is to detail and illustrate fully all of the books and associated items that Oakwood have published over the past 80 years. Oakwood is the oldest specialist British transport publisher of its type still extant.

The publishing of the small, quarterly railway magazine Locomotion, under, The Four Os Publishing, name by R. Michael Robbins and Roger W. Kidner in Sidcup, Kent during March 1931, marked the start of the Oakwood story.By 1936 with the appearance of the first of the popular Light Railway Handbooks, The Lynton and Barnstaple Railway (since much reprinted), 'Oakwood Press' became the chosen publishing title.


Scarce

September 1937 saw the publishing of The North London Railway (OL1) starting the now familiar Oakwood Library of Railway History series. Only a few other titles appeared before World War II intervened.By 1946 Oakwood was publishing again, by now with just R.W. Kidner at the helm. He made the decision, not to revive the Locomotion magazine and print 'Locomotion Papers' instead, the first of these was The Alford and Sutton Tramway.

The year 1949 saw J.I.C. Boyd's Narrow Gauge Rails to Portmadoc published, starting an important series of narrow gauge railway titles. During the 1950s along with an increase of interest in railway books, Oakwood's range of titles gradually expanded along with its reputation as specialized transport publishers, especially railways, and by the 1960s also included a canal series. Little known to many, along with the transport titles there were also other small series of specialist books on such diverse subjects as market research and gramophone records.

Jane Kennedy took over Oakwood in October 1984 and soon enthusiastically expanded the range of titles, subtly updating the style, whilst still maintaining the main theme. Since then many new titles have been published expanding the existing series as well as many new editions of earlier titles. Moving with the times a specialist range of videos were also introduced, starting in 1993, these being the products of Oakwood Video Library, an associated company. The new millennium saw the Oakwood Press range continuing to expand with many more specialist transport book titles being published and a range of DVDs following on from the videos.

Listing Oakwoods
Section One of this book acts as an introduction. It is then followed by books A1 to X99. Each series of Oakwood books has a letter(s) and number reference e.g. LP1, OL1 etc. The listing is in alphabetical/numerical order, with an illustration of each edition and reprints following each section. There is also a full title alphabetical index on pages 92 to 98 to aid finding reference details of individual titles.No official complete record of all the Oakwood books published was ever maintained, so The Oakwood Press, 80 Years, 1931-2011, A Collector's Guide is intended to remedy this.
Softcover, 12- pages.