No Starch Press recently released The Cult of LEGO, a giant picture book discussing perhaps the most cherished of childhood toys.  The book itself is a pretty epic tome: it’s nearly 300 pages, featuring countless  large pictures of lego concoctions and with relatively minimal text.  It won’t take you more than a few hours to read.  My guess is that if you are super active in the LEGO community, you won’t find anything new here, but if you are a more middle of the road builder or fanboy, you might take pleasure in these colorful pages. And seriously, who doesn’t love LEGO?

The book was written by John Baichtal of MAKE and GeekDad, and Jon Meno of BrickJournal.  The book is simply organized into a dozen chapters, but each page basically stands alone with a short story about one specific area of LEGO knowledge, starting with the history of the bricks, and working its way through fandom, styles, community gatherings, building standards and styles, and even touching on the various LEGO video game franchises.

A number of the pages are quite delightful, showcasing some absolutely amazing and innovative sculptural work built by truly talented builders.  Unfortunately the spectrum of photo quality is pretty broad: some pictures are just to small, others are a bit blurry or out of focus or just very poor quality.  This is unfortunate given that this is really more a photo book than a word book.  Also the design of many pages often weighs into my feelings as well.  Some pages are nicely laid out, but others fill like more filler. Maybe it was just the designers aesthetic, wanting to visually reflect the chunky aesthetic of a LEGO brick.  On one page of mini-figs, the same image is used on both the left and right side, tiling the images, and sort of defeating the whole message of the page.  A page of LEGO inspired comics shows multiple panels squished down so small I couldn’t really read them.  These are minor considerations individually, but I can’t help but wish a little more care was put into this aspect of the book.  And I’m not saying that it’s every page either- but many of the pages just felt rushed.

The writing isn’t shakespeare either, and some segments seem a bit repetitious.  For example, on several occasions the authors speak about the differences between the largest and smallest of builds.  They share a fair point: the biggest LEGO sculptures are the most impressive, but inside the community, often it’s the tiniest of the sculptures that are the most impressive: the dozen blocks that distill an object to its very essence.  This mantra is repeated several times.  And unsurprisingly  the book ignores its own logic showing instead the giant sculptures and proclaiming the massive brick counts.

Then again, it’s a giant self contained trip that will start you down memory lane.  Seeing images from your childhood toys: space sets and city sets brought a lot back for me.  However, the book walks through other areas, like the Cube Dudes meme that made a lot of waves awhile back, to Mindstorm projects ranging from the silly to the more educational efforts like the robotics competitions, LEGO prosthetics, and the hot air balloon experiments.

For me, there really wasn’t many surprises: a good number of these pages were once news stories that I read on blogs years ago.  But I’m probably a bit of an outlier- If I saw a news story about LEGO, I’d almost always click.  So when I saw the picture of the original Google servers in their  Mega Block Case, I knew what it was without reading the page.  And I knew it was the generic LEGO clone and not the real thing.  That’s all part of the lore.

There were a few surprises to me, like discussions of the standards agreed upon by community builders for city block dimensions to allow large scale collaboration at events.  And many of the micro scale sculptures are really amazing.  I would have loved to see more of them.  A brief mention is also made of a moonbase standard.  I would have loved to see a few examples.  Maybe even a mockup of a few of these standards.  Show me the standard base plate, and 3 variants photographed in an identical setting.  Like so many pages, I just wanted a bit more.

On a great number of pages, I felt like I wanted a few more pictures or another paragraph or two going just a little deeper into the page’s subject.  For those pages, I’m left to hit the internets to find out more about those subjects.  Other pages I barely felt the need to skim: they just weren’t interesting to me.  But the good pages vastly outnumbered the bad.

In fact this book really feels like a couple hours spent casually web browsing on a subject: some pages are fascinating… others provoke an almost immediate click of the back arrow.

But for the LEGO lover in your life, this might be a great coffee table book.  A discussion starter.   And possibly a nice christmas present.  So on that note, the book’s called The Cult of LEGO and  If you buy through that link, I think Amazon gives me some money, although I don’t think anybody has ever actually done it, so who knows.