Hammer Complete: The Films, the Personnel, the Company. By Howard Maxford. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019. 992 pages. $95 (ISBN 978-1-4766-7007-2). Ebook Available (978-1-4766-2914-8), call for pricing.

Imagine that you are the most devoted fan of your favorite thing, be it NASCAR, collecting salt and pepper shakers, or birdwatching. From childhood on, your interest in the minutiae regarding the subject of your fandom only grows. Eventually, your dream comes true, and you write an encyclopedia about your favorite subject. This scenario seems likely as this reviewer considers how Howard Maxford’s Hammer Complete: The Films, the Personnel, the Company came into being.

Hammer Productions was a British film company formed in 1934 that is most famous for its gothic horror films in the 1950s and 1960s. Through various iterations, the company produced around 150 films and several television series.

The book has a jocular introduction—in fact, it’s called “My Life with Hammer—A Rather Rambling Introduction”—and details the author’s relationship with Hammer films in particular from the age of 12 onward. Maxford tells us that his previous book about Hammer (Hammer, House of Horror: Behind the Screams, Batsford, 1996) just skimmed the surface, and he sought to correct that with this book. Maxford writes, “This second volume, I was determined, would simply overflow with facts and figures, quotes from my own various Hammer-related interviews (including previously unpublished material), and anecdotes from other sources, including biographies, autobiographies, DVD and Blu-ray commentaries, magazines, newspapers and studio histories, etc. [in] an all-encompassing A-Z of the studio (which hadn’t been done before)” (3). Maxford has certainly met his goal.

To say that Maxford is enthusiastic about his subject would be an understatement. He has left no stone unturned. In fact, he turned each stone and then wrote a few entries about what he found underneath. This reviewer is confident that there is no better place to find information on Hammer films than this book. (However, is it possible to have too much information about a subject? Each uncredited harem girl, each clapper loader, and each third assistant carpenter has an entry here). There is also an appendix that lists the films that never made it to production, a well-sourced notes section, and a bibliography. For all of the details, a simple filmography would have been a great addition for the non-Hammerphiles among us.

This effusively thorough, physically giant encyclopedia isn’t for everyone, but would make a good addition to a library at a college or university that offers a film program.—Tracy Carr, Library Services Director, Mississippi Library Commission, Jackson, Mississippi