The Kit Wars: Airfix, Revell, and the Battle for the Bedroom Floor
The 1960s Duel That Defined Plastic Modeling

About this book:

On rainy Saturday afternoons in the 1960s, a quiet battle raged across bedroom floors on both sides of the Atlantic. Armed with tube cement, enamel tins, and razor blades, a generation of kids snapped olive-drab Spitfires and candy-apple hot rods from grey plastic sprues—unaware they were the foot soldiers in a high-stakes corporate war. *The Kit Wars* tells the riveting story of how Hungarian immigrant Nicholas Kove turned a Woolworths counter into a British empire with Airfix, while Lewis Glaser’s Revell rode the American wave of custom car culture and Cold War cool. When Revell invaded UK shores, the duel ignited an arms race of scale precision, iconic box art, and marketing genius that defined the golden age of plastic modeling.

But this is more than a tale of two companies. It’s a sensory time machine: the sharp sting of polystyrene cement, the frustration of a misaligned landing gear, the glossy sheen of Humbrol paint drying on a fingertip. From the revolutionary Ferguson tractor that proved the concept to the Apollo rockets that carried the hobby into the Space Age, the book traces how injection-molded polystyrene transformed modeling from a carpenter’s craft into a mass-market phenomenon. You’ll meet the illustrators like Roy Cross whose dramatic box covers promised adventure, the marketers who turned instruction sheets into gospel, and the kids who built carpet fleets and ceiling dogfights to process a world shadowed by WWII and nuclear anxiety.

Deeply researched and vividly written, *The Kit Wars* reveals how industrial design, geopolitical tension, and post-war economics converged in a box of plastic parts. Whether you spent your youth painstakingly applying Luftwaffe camouflage or simply remember the thrill of cracking open a fresh kit, this book recovers a lost ritual of patience and imagination—and shows how two rival brands engineered a global passion that still shapes the hobby today.