The Complete Pinball Book
Collecting the Game and its History
2nd edition
by Marco Rossignoli
review by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu)
Created:  Jan 27, 2003
Updated:  Sep 17, 2012
http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/completepinball.txt

This book is a lot of things.  In no particular order, it:

* is expensive -- $59.99 list.

* is of serious heft -- It would probably do more damage to your foot than 
Supercade and that is saying something.

* is interesting -- I like this book for a lot reasons, but the
most compelling one is the pictures.  The book contains many excellent
pictures of machines, flyers, playfields and blackglasses.  I defy
anyone who enjoyed pinball (in the US) during the 70s and 80s to pick
up this book and not to say, at least once, "Hey, I used to play that
one."  I also learned quite a bit from this book (conversion kits for
pinball?  The Universal company made pinball machines?  There were how many
pinballs made outside of the US?), which is always doubleplusgood to my
way of thinking.

* is poorly titled -- While I agree that it's a good pinball book, I cannot
agree that it's a "complete" anything.  Admittedly, the "Pinball List" at 
the back of the book is fairly complete and great fun to browse through.  
Still, many times the author would describe something that I found
particularly interesting without an accompanying picture.  This
wouldn't be so frustrating if the book was all or mostly text, but it's
chock-full of pictures on heavy, glossy stock.  The pictures, again,
are terrific, but the text begs (in vain) for additional ones.

* contains some questionable, or at least non-USA, terms presented as
general pinball terms.  For example, "pinnie" for pinball, "pinheads"
for pinball enthusiasts, "the guts" for the outhole, etc.  These are
all new terms to me, but admittedly, I may be out of touch.

* contains some 'orrible writing -- When the author sticks to facts and
analysis, the writing is usually fine.  However, this doesn't occur nearly
enough.  I was treated to the author's personal strolls down memory lane,
captions that were often word-for-word from the text, complete and utter
inanity that reads as if it were lifted from a 7th grade Social Studies book
(One caption example: "On what popular television and motion picture series 
was this pinball based?  Find out in Chapter Eight."), an annoying 
introduction that almost made me skip all the text completely and comments
that should have been excised long before they ever made it to the page.

An example of this last case is the picture on the Introduction page 
from Bally's Playboy playfield depicting a nude women behind a sign that
reads "It takes steel balls to play pinball."  The caption reads:

"Playfield detail from Bally's PLAYBOY (1978).  It sure does!"

I'm so pleased that such an ardent confirmation merited inclusion.  I know
it and so many other comments of this type were used as weapons in their
book-long subjugation of subtlety.  Alas, subtlety and the concept of allowing
the pictures to speak for themselves never stood a chance.

Finally, will someone please go over to Mr. Rossignoli's house and rip the
! key off of his keyboard?  Thank you.

["Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than 
two or three per 100,000 words of prose." -- Elmore Leonard ]

* is comprehensive enough that multiple readings are needed to absorb
everything that is there.  The re-read (re-look?) value of this book is high.

* is, overall, a very nice book if you can ignore the poor writing.
Unlike Supercade, where you are almost required to ignore the writing and 
get lost in the pictures, there is too much good stuff in the text to skip.  
Darn shame one needs a shovel and a sieve (in many places) to uncover it.