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Foreword

One of Tamiya's strengths is to have started publishing catalogues very soon after they started on the model market, editing one catalogue for the static model range of products, and another one dedicated to RC models. In France, they were sold in toy stores and their content was a great surprise for those who bought them. Printed on glossy paper, the overall quality and pictures were true dream teasers and soon the young reader would become a customer after some parent harassment . I remember me spending hours reading the 1987 RC catalogue (word after word: my skills in English were almost non existent by the time).

I want to thank Pottok and Teamneogordini from the Vintage-RC forum who provided many pages displayed here. A very special thank goes to those who spent hours scanning and transfering complete RC Guide Books: Guillaume (1995 edition), Tony (1985 edition), Clive (1987 and 2001 editions) and Replay (éditions 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005 as well as 1973, 1976 and 1977 catalogues).

There are now more than 1600 pages to read: if you didn't know what to do during those cold long winter nights, now you know .

All the photos on this page are © Tamiya.

Viewing the catalogues

Browsing this page is similar to the Tamiya Museum virtual tour: every catalogue is displayed in a gallery as long as I have images for the chosen year. Complete catalogues are shown  in bold . To display a catalogue, just click on its cover image to start the gallery. On every image that will display, you'll see 4 buttons. At the top center of each image:
      go back to the previous photo
      start or pause the automatic slideshow
      go to the next photo

And the last button at the top right side:
      close the slideshow at any moment which gets you back right here

In case you forget these instructions when viewing, just point your mouse on a button and wait for the pop-up explanation.

Enjoy.

The RC Guide Books

Collector's Saint Graal, these are invevitable bibles: they are true machines to grow large amounts of Tamiyafans! Every model is presented, some with many details, but above everything else, many are shot in action on splendid photo series: makes you dream and makes the reader's imagination work at full load.

The RC Guide Books do not only present the models: they also feature many short articles explaining driving technics, teaching how to make a track and many other advices to get the most fun out of the models.

Unfortunately, I don't have every year edition, some are incomplete and others are not at their best quality. Nevertheless, I deeply modified the page code in order to enhance the presentation and I added every single page I had. If you have better scans than those diplayed here, please contact me and I will add them.

Last but not least: it is extremly complex to date each edition and to sort them in their original publication order. Several reasons for that:
  The RC Guide Books have no year information before the 2000 edition
  They were not published at fixed periods
  In the first editions, some models were presented long before their effective availability
  The same cover could be used for different editions (1981/1982, 1988/1989, 1991/1992)
  During the 80's and 90's, distributor published their own versions, modifying both the content and the covers, apart from publishing at different periods.

This is why I worked with Lars from TamiyaBase to better sort things out. One of our methods was to compare each model official release date with its first appearance in an RC Guide Book in order to determine the book publication year. Even then, the result is still pretty uncertain because of the distributors' local editions.

Among the biggest changes, the RC Guide Book showing the Lamborghini Countach on cover changes from 1980 to 1979 and 1986 edition disappears since it was never published by Tamiya Japan. Given the complexity, I chose not to consider distributors' editions: the sorting order you see is correct and based on the original japanese-language publication chronology from Tamiya Japan.
But the scans being international versions, some editions content may be different from the original japanese edition content. Next consequence, this chronology may not be the same à the one of local editions published by distributors since they sometimes modified the covers in addition to modifying the centent.

In the end, I hope this sorting order will serve its primary goal: to immerge you in your memories.

1979	1980	1981	1982	1983
1984	1985	1986	1987	1988
1989	1990	1991	1992	1993
1994	1995 (Early Ed.)	1995 (Late Ed.)	1996 (Early Ed.)	1996 (Late Ed.)
1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
2002	2003	2004	2005

If you have better scans than those diplayed here, please contact me and I will add them.

Please note that Tamiya stopped publishing RC Guide Books since 2005. From 2008, the RC Line-UP took the relay in a differrent format since there are 2 to 3 editions per year depending on the manufacturer's news. Officially, these catalogues are not free (like the RC Guide Books), but some stores offer them for free with an order and thus please their customers.

I know some stores that have this elegant customer-oriented manner but I am not allowed to cite them here. The French law from which my site depends would only allow me to cite french stores: not a single one (to my knwoledge) showing the elementary consideration to their customers, the list would be empty. More about this in the Tamiya distribution in Europe section.

I am not allowed to publish the RC Line-UP, not even to present the sole covers in order for you to identify them and find them at your LHS. Some hints to help those of you who might be interested though:
  RC Line-UP numbering is of the "Volume N Year" type. Example : Volume 1 2011. This is shown on the front cover, sometimes along with the season (winter, spring, summer or autumn).
  Use internet search engines: "rc line-up" should lead you to what you are looking for, especially the front covers images.
  To my knowledge, here are the existing volumes per year:
     2008: volumes 1, 2 and 3
     2009: volumes 1 and 2
     2010: volumes 1 and 2
     2011: volumes 1 and 2

About the "Tamiya Perfect Guide" catlogues that some of you may have heard of: they are published in Japan by Gakken, not by Tamiya. Exclusively in japonese language and exclusively sold in Japan, I am not allowed either to publish nor to present them here.

The catalogues

A few years before they started publishing the RC Guide Books, Tamiya was already editing yearly catalogues to present their whole range of products. At first, they only presented static models, but Tamiya entering the RC world revealed the need of a dedicated version for this new market. Whereas the catalogues were presenting both static and RC models, the RC Guide Books were exclusively dedicated to RC. I guess this means that Tamiya considered from the begining that static models fans could become RC fans, but not the opposite. Sorry for "shelf-queens" fans, but this smells like pure logic. Of course, this is no judgment in anyway for shelf-queens fans: everybody is free to live its passion the way he wants.

So here are those catalogues I could gather especially thanks to Pottok from the Vintage-RC forum. A special thank too goes to Replay for scanning the full 1973, 1976 and 1977 editions. The galleries work like the RC Guide Books'.

Teaser: have a very close look at the before last photo in the 1980 catalogue. You will notice the "Coming soon" column: this is some sort of Tamiyablog ancestor . But if you look even closer the announced RA-1020 model and then compare it with the real model released in 1980 (58020 after the change in model references), you will notice some différences...

1972	1973	1974	1975	1976
1977	1978	1979	1980	1981
1982	1983	1984	1985	1986
1987	1988	1989	1990	1991
1992	1993	1994	1995	1996
1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
2002	2003	2004	2005

Here too, Tamiya stopped publishing their catalogues in 2005. To my knowledge there is no replacement.

If you have better scans than those diplayed here, please contact me and I will add them

Special thanks

I want to thank Torstein Hønsi who is the designer of the Highslide JS galleries I use on this page to display the catalogues. The gallery code is open source, which means you can freely use it and modify it in non-commercial projects. If you are looking for a reliable gallery script that is easy to adapt to your needs, I recommend you to consider this great solution. Moreover, with Highslide JS, you benefit from a very skilled and reactive helping community (special thanks to EarlyOut and Roadrash for their help).

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Première publication : august 05, 2009 Dernière modification : august 08, 2011

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