Paul Villiard's book is an easy to understand source of information for beginning stamp collectors.

This book is written by an American in 1968. This means American brands, firms and addresses of more than 30 years ago are being used. It contains only 7 drawings, 46 low-quality black-and-white photo's and 4 low-quality colour photo's. There's loads and loads of text with hardly any paragraphing which makes it very hard to read.
No doubt this book was a very good book at the time and it has clearly been written by an enthousiast with great knowledge, insight and experience. But nowadays you can choose from many other books with far more and better photo's and drawings containing more general and up to date information, which are much easier to read.