Hi,
I owned a Philips EE1003 electronics kit when I was around 13 years old which dissapeared as the result of a house move, some years later I found one at a car boot sale for the princeley sum of £3 and snapped it up, it is still in my possesion. Recently, when bored one evening, I constructed one of the AM radios.
My "car boot" kit did not have the original instruction book but an interent search found one (and many others)
here
I don't think that the kit was a "starter" for me, as I had been messing around with old radios and suchlike for some time before that, but it certainly helped!
Andrew