Star Wars: The Ultimate Action Figure Collection

The complete and definitive collection of Star Wars action figures produced over the last 35 years.

It's a world of just a few inches, and its inhabitants have played a key role in making Star Wars a part of popular culture.

Star Wars was the right movie at the right time for many reasons, as it helped popularize and expand a small but growing trend of modern toy collecting in the 1970s. Until then, collectibles generally meant dolls, model trains, and cars, and collectors were mostly well-to-do adults who had the time and inclination to seek out specialized dealers and events around the world.

While this began to change with kids collecting affordable and accessible comics and baseball cards, it was Star Wars that spurred the modern toy collecting movement. The numbers don't lie: by 1985, around 250 million Star Wars action figures had been sold worldwide.

Star Wars: The Ultimate Action Figure Collection focuses on the characters and the action figures themselves. Characters are sorted alphabetically by the first letter of their name, and figures of the same character are sorted chronologically. This allows readers to see how the art of modeling and figure production has changed dramatically over the life of the Star Wars line—and how many different versions of a single character have been released.

For the casual or beginning collector and the nostalgia lover, or the seasoned collector who wants to investigate each figure, Star Wars: The Ultimate Action Figure Collection is a great way to take a tour of the still-expanding universe of nearly 2,500 individual figures, compiled by Stephen J. Sansweet, owner of the largest private collection of Star Wars memorabilia in the world.