Books like Airliners of the World tend to take two forms. First, there is the coffee table book that’s heavy on the visuals but best eyeballed in your living room. Then there is the ‘field guide’ motif. This version is meant to leave home with you and to frequent air shows, airports, and the spectator area alongside some runways.
Airliners of the World comes halfway between these two conventional types. It’s a paperback and not a particularly sturdy one, so not the stuff of most coffee tables. On the other hand, it carries the kind of dense information and smallish visuals on its two-aircraft-per-page format that are common to the field guide genre.
What sets Stewart Wilson’s book apart from most others is its attention to the long haul of commercial air history. It begins with 1914 and claims to survey all commercial aircraft that have lifted people and set them back down—usually safely—since that time.
If you want to see how Antonov or Boeing or Fokker has waltzed through the decades, this is a fine volume to do it with, since Wilson organizes his aircraft by manufacturer as his first sort criterion and date of production after that.
Most of the aircraft are photographed, the quality of the shots varying with the photographic technology available when the plane in question was flying. Occasionally an airplane is drawn.
The livery varies widely, so you get lots of exposure to off-the-beaten-track airlines as a bonus. An introductory section called ‘Milestones of Commercial Aviation’ is a planespotter’s dream.
Canter Bridge 
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