For many years, I’ve been wanting to find a copy of the LEGO Trains Idea Book (#7777). When I was a kid, I remember having it, and must have looked through it for hours on end, my imagination running wild with the plastic trains. But I haven’t seen my copy for years, despite repeated searches through my parents’ house, and the book, published in 1981, has been out of print for years. What copies are available for sale online are $125 and up. There’s a pretty active LEGO train community online, and a number of tantalizing links claiming to be scans of the book, but I never managed to find any, so I couldn’t even revisit it through images on the computer screen.

This weekend I was at my parents’, and I actually happened across it, hidden under a pile of papers at the bottom of a bookshelf. It’s pretty beat up, taped together and a few pages missing, but I wasn’t expecting to find it, so that was pretty exciting. Ironically, I did this evening actually manage to find a complete set of scans of the book. Which I no longer need, now that I have the book. Or vice versa.