Oh, and speaking of how easy it is to get hard-copies of GW books...
I suppose not everyone these days knows this, but for a long time the Gundam Weapons books were numbered. Gundam Weapons 5 and 6 dealt with the MG Gundam and MG Zaku (version 1.0) respectively - and a lot of the other GW books from back then - while they each had their own particular focus on a specific kit or anime series - also carried a sequential number...
So what's the point? The GW book that corresponds to the start of the Master Grade line was, according to its sequential number, the fifth Gundam Weapons book. It's also the earliest Gundam Weapons book still being reprinted, as far as I know. So what about GW 1-4? As it turns out, since these books predate most of what we now think as the "high quality" Gundam kits covering the classic series from 1979 through the early 90s, these books focused a lot on quality build-ups of the older kits, or scratch builds...
I recently picked up (via Yahoo! Japan auctions) two of these early volumes: Gundam Weapons UC 0080 (I'm not sure, but I think this is "Gundam Weapons #1" though it isn't marked as such) and Gundam Weapons 2... The UC 0080 book mostly contains build-ups of the old 0080 kit line (builds that appeared in Hobby Japan in 1989), plus a few 0080-inspired scratch builds... And Gundam Weapons 2 is almost entirely composed of scratch builds... It's great stuff, I love to see what modelers would come up with back when Gundam kits weren't generally considered to be "good enough" as they were...
Anyway, I actually got a pretty good deal on these. Something like 600 yen for one and 800 yen for the other. I bought them via Celga, so once you add on shipping within Japan, proxy fees, and international shipping, it wound up being about $50 total for the two books. Still, that's really not bad... $25 each...
