Do you know...

[Hambone]

Does any one know of any books that would contain a variety of aircraft ranging from world war 1 to present day?

[Colin1]

Take your pick:-

Amazon.com: military aircraft: Books

Most books of this genre, even the really thick ones will only be very generic by nature, not that that's necessarily a bad thing but don't expect anything too in-depth on any one type.

[zoomar]

Also, a lot of these books consist of pretty color pictures and cut-away drawings with just enough text (often assembled by an editor who seems to not be an expert) to fill in the white spaces. Its like some publishers said, "we've got all these cool color pictures and plan drawings hanging around so lets put together another mega airplane survey book". They often present specifications with very little analysis or discussion. I can also fault them on a western (often British) bias. Ten pages might be spent on description and pictures of every Spifire or Hurricane variant while the entire Lagg/La series of Soviet fighters, the Zero, and even the Fw190 series get half as much.