What are the Devil May Cry strategy guides?

Devil May Cry arrived in the last golden age of the printed strategy guide, and the market treated it like a prize. In North America in 2001, one game received three English guides: BradyGames' Official Strategy Guide, Prima Games' Official Strategy Guide, and Versus Books' Official Perfect Guide, the last also published in German. The BradyGames book, by Dan Birlew, set the series' print standard at 160 pages, with area maps of Mallet Island, the full weapons and items listing, boss strategies, puzzle solutions and the Secret Mission locations that the game itself hides completely.

Birlew then wrote the whole trilogy for BradyGames: the Devil May Cry 2 guide (2003, 144 pages, in the publisher's Signature Series with a fold-out poster), and the Devil May Cry 3 guide (2005), whose walkthrough opens every mission with a recommended style and equipment loadout, the print era adapting to a game built on choices. Japan's shelf ran parallel and deeper, as this Library's guide censuses keep finding: Kadokawa, Enterbrain, Kodansha and Futabasha all published for the series, and the pattern held to the end of the era, when Future Press took the English guide for Devil May Cry 4 in 2008. Every one of these books is long out of print.