8 Inspiring Books for Lego Builders

The Lego Ideas Book, by Daniel Lipkowitz
As its title suggests, this book provides ideas for building lots of different Lego creations. The book is divided into 6 sections—transportation, buildings, space, kingdoms, adventure, and useful makes—each featuring the basic parts needed to make the creations featured in that section and completed designs photographed from multiple angles to help builders reverse-engineer them. The book also offers suggestions for ways to simplify the creations, so you don’t have to worry if you don’t have all the parts.

LEGO Chain Reactions: Design and Build Amazing Moving Machines, by Pat Murphy
This spiral-bound book features instructions for building 10 Lego machines that can be used together to create chain reactions. It includes more than 30 pieces to build the machines, but requires other Lego pieces, so it’s best for those who already have an extensive Lego collection and want to discover new ways to use their pieces.

The LEGO Neighborhood Book: Build Your Own Town!, by Brian Lyles and Jason Lyles
The Lego Neighborhood Book gives experienced builders a chance to create buildings with architectural features like cornices and facades, as well as real-world features like park benches, plants, traffic lights and scaffolding. The book includes step-by-step instructions for 4 multi-story buildings, as well as a gallery of the authors’ designs and inspirations for other builds.

LEGO Play Book: Ideas to Bring Your Bricks to Life, by Daniel Lipkowitz and Gregory Farshtey
The LEGO Play Book features more than 200 builds, from simple to more complex designs, as well as tips and tricks to help builders get more out of their bricks. The book also includes “ten-minute” builds for quick and easy designs, ideas for using key Lego bricks and a “handful of bricks” section for ideas using a limited number of bricks.

Cool Creations in 35 Pieces, by Sean Kenney
In this book, Lego artist Sean Kenney uses the same 35 pieces to construct different Lego creations, including vehicles, spaceships, animals, robots and more. The book includes step-by-step instructions for some of the builds, as well as a list of the 35 Legos used to make them. Many of the parts are more specialized than typical Lego bricks, but this book is a great way to spark creativity and think of alternative ways to build creations, even if you don’t have all the parts.

Lego Crazy Action Contraptions, by Klutz
This 50-page, spiral-bound book comes with 105 Lego parts—every brick, axle and gear you need to build all 16 projects featured in the book. Each project also includes step-by-step instructions, making it easy to replicate the builds. If you’re looking for something that includes all the parts you’ll need and diagrams for every project, this book is a great find.

The LEGO Technic Idea Book: Simple Machines, by Yoshihito Isogawa
This book uses parts from various Technic sets to create hundreds of working models. To aid with building, each model uses color-coded pieces and is photographed from multiple angles. Included in the designs are basic gears, shafts, pulleys, turntables and connectors, allowing the builder to create cranes, motorized cars, a rocket launcher, drag racer and musical instruments.

Brick Wheels: Incredible Moving Inventions to Make from LEGO, by Warren Elsmore
Master modeler Warren Elsmore highlights 40 amazing vehicles in this book highlighting the history of transportation. Broken into four chapters—Road and Rail, Rivers and Oceans, Flying Machines and the Final Frontier—it includes illustrations of a horse and carriage, freight train, speed boat, cruise liner, the Wright Brothers’ first airplane, Tesla electric car, Curiosity Mars rover and more. Included in the book are two posters featuring Lego transportation scenes and step-by-step instructions for some of the smaller projects.
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