The All-American Five Radio. Richard McWhorter. 2003.

This is a short book (96 pages officially—really 92) but it's no-nonsense. McWhorter chooses a 1950 RCA 9X561, an early All American Five (AA5), and discusses how and why it works. As with Marcus & Levy below, he breaks down the radio into discrete stages and discusses each separately. Unlike Marcus & Levy, the entire focus is on this single radio—with the idea that if you understand this one, you can figure out the minor variations in other AA5s.

The book assumes no prior knowledge of electronics, so a chunk of the book at the beginning is devoted to the very basics: what is voltage, current, resistance, Ohm's law, how a capacitor works, and so on. Obviously at 92 pages you're not going to get a through education, but it's enough to get you by. The idea is teach someone enough to fix this radio (if it isn't too far gone) without having to go through a full radio course. From that respect it's good; it's simply written and it's heavily illustrated. But its brevity means there's a lot of stuff left out: actual "repair" info is thin, and common fixes like what to about a slipping dial cord or how to align the receiver aren't mentioned at all. The book is mainly about understanding how it works, with a modicum of repair info added.

I'm luke-warm on it. It's good for what it is, but I would have like to have seen a lot more in the repair and restoration department. I think his book The Vacuum Tube Short Wave Radio is far better.

McWhorter also has a YouTube channel with videos about radios, repair and related subjects.

(A Modern Look at) Antique Radio Repair. Alfred Corbin. 3rd edition (2010)

This is the most recent repair text that I've seen. It also comes spiral-bound so lies flat on a table or bench, which is a godsend if you're reading while you're working on something. My only quibble is that it's the size of a regular book, which makes some of the schematic diagrams small and hard to read. Compare this to the text itself, which is larger-than-average and easy to read; I would have loved this before I got my bifocals.

Corbin's doing what McWhorter tried to do in The AA5 (above) except that he's taking a broader look, whereas McWhorter studies one single radio. So this book is really much closer to Marcus & Levy's Elements of Radio Servicing (below), except that this is written for a modern audience. Marcus & Levy wrote in an era when these radios were current or just passably old; Corbin's writing about antiques. It's the difference between a repair manual for a Ford Model T written in 1930 vs. 2010. Things change.

The upside is that it's very well written and decently illustrated. At almost 300 pages, it gets into a lot of detail that McWhorter's AA5 didn't have room or time for. All the important stuff is there: common types of radios, alignment, recapping, all about tubes, components, antennas, and so on.

The downside is that it's organized in an odd way. It starts with "a little history" and then goes to "first aid for an old radio." Then it's back types of radios, then back to earlier types (regens and TRFs). Then there's a bit on automobile radios (something you don't see in most books, so it's worth mentioning here). Then FM. Then we get to fundamentals of servicing, alignment and recapping. Then a discussion of tubes, followed by a rundown of component types (resistors, caps, coils, etc.) Then onto common failure modes, etc.

I read a critical review on Amazon that the book seems to jump all over, and I agree. If you have some background already, you can follow it. But if you were coming in from square one, knowing almost nothing about electronics, the book is going to be a bit confusing. It would be the sort of text you'd have to read through entirely first, then things would make more sense on the second run-through.

Also, like McWhorter, Marcus & Levy, and most other antique radio repair books, it's aimed at the Superheterodyne mass-manufactured radio. Granted, that's 99% of radios out there by numbers. But it means that if you're interested in TRFs (popular in the 1920s), or that Hammarlund boat anchor, or even a Zenith Transoceanic, this is just a starting point and you'll have to go elsewhere for more info.

But that, like the schematic sizes, are quibbles. I genuinely like this book and I learned a lot from it. Very much worth reading.

Collector's Guide to Antique Radios. John Slusser & the Staff of Radio Daze. 5th edition (2002)

As I say for all collector's guides, I don't have much use for price lists. Pricing is far too varied to be representative of what you'd see in reality; but at least they do give you a heads up whether a given radio is generally valuable or generally dime-a-dozen. Though it never seems to keep the local antique co-op from pricing a 60s GE clock radio as if it were a catalin Fada.

This one is listed in "database" format, in other words, it's mainly a text listing of makes and models with a little bit of info. E.g. Zenith 5-G-500, portable, 1941, cloth covered, inner right black dial, left grille, fold-down front, handle, 2 Z knobs, BC, 5 tubes, AC/DC/battery....$25-30. So if you've got a Zenith 5-G-500 it'll tell you the year it was made and couple other pieces if info you may not know, but that's it. If you have a radio that's without identification markings (and we've all seen those), you ain't gonna find it in here. There are a some photos, but far, far fewer than listings.

I've got the 5th edition. The current one is the 7th (2008) and can be purchased and downloaded as a PDF from the publisher's website.

The Complete Price Guide to Antique Radios. Mark V. Stein (various editions and volumes)

My review here is actually for a collection of books by Mark Stein, and it can be confusing. There was a multiple volume set called Machine Age to Jet Age: Radioman's Guide to Tabletop Radios. It appears that everything is now being collected under the Complete Price Guide to Antique Radios marquee and Machine Age to Jet Age is now Tabletop Radios Volume 1. (see photo right). As far as I know, subsequent volumes of Machine Age to Jet Age haven't been updated yet.

Stein's also written a number of other collector's guides to various radios under various titles. I'm just going to treat them all together as one here.

Unlike David & Betty Johnson's Guide to Old Radios (see below), this is pretty-much all price guide and little else. I don't have much use for price guides per se (prices are quickly obsoleted and often don't reflect the prices I see); where this shines is that it's not just a list of makes and models, it has photos of each. This makes it extraordinarily useful in identifying old radios. A lot of times you may have a make but no model—these books give you photos so you can visually identify it. It won't tell you more than a make, model, year it was made and a price, but it's a start.

The problem with any collector's guide named "complete" is that it isn't, expecially when you're dealing with multiple volumes. My Hoffman A300-like radio isn't listed in Volume 1, and Hoffman as a make doesn't appear at all in Volume 2 (I haven't bought subsequent volumes yet).

That said, many radios are pictured and it's worth checking out.

Elements of Radio. Abraham Marcus & William Marcus. 6th Edition, 1973.

This was designed as a textbook for a year-long vocational school course on radio, and include quizzes and lab experiments.

This is a very good companion piece to Elements of Radio Servicing by Marcus & Levy (mentioned below). Whereas the other books are hard-targeted on repair, this is a bit more open ended and general on radio topics.

They approach it by beginning with the bare minimum: an antenna, a ground connection, a detector and some kind of speaker. They discuss how it and why things work. Then they improve it a little by adding coils for transfer coupling. Then they add a capacitor to make a tank circuit. Then they change the crystal detector to a rectifier tube. They slowly keep adding and building and making the radio more complex but better performing, step by step, explaining the hows and whys along the way.

The nice thing about this book is that it really digs into the subject in depth, whereas most other books don't have the time or scope to do it. Even with Elements of Radio Servicing, the focus is on why things are there rather than how they got there. The end result is the same, but a person who reads this book may get a better understanding of what the engineers were thinking when they designed these rigs.

The bad part of the book is that even the 1974 edition is very dated. If you want to do the lab experiements yourself, you're going to be hard pressed to find some of the equipment (like old telephone headsets) that were taken for granted then.

I'm still working my way through the book so I can't comment on how they handle solid-state electronics. The bulk of the book (as is the last edition of Elements of Radio Servicing) focused primarily on vacuum-tube technology. So if you want to learn to work on old hollow-state radios, I think it's a must-have. If you want to work on transistor-era radios, I don't know how helpful it will be, but it certainly won't hurt.

Guide to Old Radios: Pointers, Pictures and Prices. David & Betty Johnson. 2nd Edition, 1995.

I generally don't care much for price guides, and because this is relatively old, the price guide portion is far out of date. What makes this worthwhile is that the price guide is only half the book. The other half is a keeper.

The Johnsons don't just list radio makes and models, the first half of the book is a short history of the development of radio. While the parts on broadcasting history are interesting but irrelevent, the actual development of radio is important because it teaches you the evolution of design, both in cabinets and chasses. If you read those chapters, you'll have a far better eye for determining when a given radio was manufactured and why. Yyou'll know why radios in the 20s had three huge knobs and two smaller ones, and what the A, B and C batteries were for. You'll get a sense of why radios in the 20s and early 30s were ornate, when tuning eyes and telephone dials were in vogue, and why plastic bodies ultimately became king.

There's also some practical advice on judging radios. Besides the obvious (radios with missing knobs are less valuable. Radios with missing trim should be avoided because you may never find a replacement), they discuss the difference between Bakelite and Catalin, Urea and Styrene plastics and how they effect value. Overall, I found it an enlightening and interesting read.

Elements of Radio Servicing

I'm treating these all in one section since they go together.

Marcus & Levy were educators, and these are textbooks aimed at teaching vocational students how to repair radios as a profession, so their focus is on repairing the commercial-broadcast AM and FM radios that people would be most likely to bring into a shop for repair (including car radios). Ham gear, military surplus sets and CB are not covered. Neither are the very old TRF, one-tube regenerators, and other pre-superhet rigs that were popular in the 20s but typically built from kits or plans.

Their approach is to take a garden variety superhetrodyne radio, break it down into separate stages (e.g. power supply, mixer, IF amp, final audio amp) and discuss how it works, what goes wrong and how to fix it. Typically they use a generic radio design for teaching, and suppliment with actual radio models to explain how various manufacturers use different approaches to solve a given problem.

So which edition is the most desirable? In my opinion, they rank in reverse order of publication: the third edition is best, followed by Practical, and the first edition from 1947 is the least.

That's because with each later publication you get the advantage of newer technology. The 1947 edition only discusses pre-war AM sets with transformer power supplies and 6-volt octal tubes. While a lot of the information is useful, it's still very limited. Practical begins with the standard transformerless AC/DC set, aka the All-American-5, which is much more common and a good set to learn on. It discusses both the older chassis-mount and newer printed-circuit models. And it also includes chapters on transistor radios and FM radios (albiet mostly tube jobs). It is, in my opinion, head-and-shoulders above the original 1947 edition.

The final 3rd edition (from 1967) isn't such a big step beyond Practical, but it's still a bit more advanced. It's also a little better illustrated, and wheras Practical has the rectangular format of a normal book, Elements (3rd edition) is square and more like a textbook; the pages lay a bit more flat (mine does, anyway), and the illustrations are more often present normally, rather than turned 90° to fit on a page, so you're not always turning the book sideways to read a schematic and then turning it back to read the text. Little things like that are nice.

The 1947 first edition is freely available on the internet, so don't buy a digital copy unless you get some kind of deal. Find it at Antique Radios. For the others, keep an eye out at used bookstores. Some public libraries still have the later editions as well.

Inside the Vacuum Tube. John Francis Rider. 1st Edition, 1945.

Great book. It's a basic texbook to introduce vacuum tubes. The book begins assuming almost no prior knowledge, so it explains quite a lot about the nature of electrons and electrical current, which sets up the concept of space charge and attraction, which leads into how the cathode and plate work, then how the grid affects the current flow, and so on.

I found that things got hairy when he moved into tetrodes and pentodes, but still very clear and readable. It's also one of those books which tries to explain how things work without advanced math; so instead of formulae, you learn how to read the standard graphs and follow load lines, which is useful because vacuum tube data sheets typically print these charts.

It's an excellent book if you want to get a good look at how tubes work and why, rather than that they simply do.

This is freely available on the internet, so don't buy a digital copy unless you get some kind of deal. Find it at Antique Radios.

Vacuum Tube Shortwave Radio: Understanding and Troubleshooting by Richard McWhorter. 1st Ed. 2007

It looks like a PDF copy of a traditionally printed book. I don't know the background behind it, but you can get this PDF directly from the author at www.richardmcwhorter.com for free!

The irony is that this is a book worth paying for. In a way it's a companion piece to his All American Five book (see above). But whereas the All American Five Radio is very short (92 pages), this one is 212 pages, and it looks, feels and seems much more complete. The All American Five looks at one specific radio as an example, this one uses various models as examples.

This book really shines in two areas. First is that it's devoted to boat anchors, those huge, metal-clad multi-band communications receivers like my National and Hallicrafters, which are more complicated than the AM-only table radios that most repair guides concentrate on. And even if you don't have a traditional boat anchor, extra shortwave bands were a common luxury feature on many "standard" radios. SW bands went in and out of vogue numerous times over the years.

The other is this book goes heavily into troubleshooting, which is extremely useful whether you're working on a hardcore boat anchor, a regular table radio with a couple of extra SW bands, or even an AA5.

Even though it's free and it's a PDF, the whole thing looks professionally done. It's clean, well-written, nicely illustrated, and well done all the way around. Highly recommended.