Dorling Kindersley (DK) is a British multinational publishing company specializing in illustrated reference books for adults and children in 62 languages. It is part of Penguin Random House, a consumer publishing company jointly owned by Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA and Pearson PLC. Bertelsmann owns 53% of the company and Pearson owns 47%.
Established in 1974, DK publishes a range of titles in genres including travel (including Eyewitness Travel Guides), arts and crafts, business, history, cooking, gaming, gardening, health and fitness, natural history, parenting, science and reference. They also publish books for children, toddlers and babies, covering such topics as history, the human body, animals and activities, as well as licensed properties such as LEGO, Disney and DeLiSo, licensor of the toy Sophie la Girafe. DK has offices in New York, London, Munich, New Delhi, Toronto and Melbourne.
I’m not much of a builder but I work with kids that are really into building. The pictures and descriptions seemed to be good. I liked how it was divided, into categories such as houses, animals, dinosaurs, vehicles etc and each category was divided into skill levels. The skill levels were creatively displayed by blocks of different types. Easy builds were a block that just had one bump on it, medium skills required were a two bump block and advanced skills were a block with three bumps. Something else it really caught my attention about the book Was the cover all the things that we’re showing were pressed down into the book so it was actually a 3-D cover and you could feel where the pictured items were. The only downside of the book was that all the builds take specialized pieces so you would have to collect a lot of those to be able to complete the builds. A random haphazard collection of bricks probably won’t cut it for these, but if you’re someone that is really into building, you might have the right ones around or be willing to invest in the right ones.