Alfred Znamierowski seems to have cornered the market in informative flag books and this latest version of his encyclopedia is an excellent buy. I originally bought Brian Johnson Barker's Complete guide to flags of the world and though it's good and up to date I didn't think the thick paper and the perfect binding on the paperback edition would last too long with regular usage.
For more or less the same money as the Johnson Barker book this World encyclopedia of flags is vastly superior. The 256 pages are split into two sections, the first looks at flags (and pennants) historically, flag design, usage, government, military and naval flags et cetera. The second part details flags of the world and frequently breaks these down to flags of country regions. Each gets some detail about the origins and meanings of the flag's graphic elements.
There are some interesting pages at the back with flags from international organisations, regional and local flags, peoples and causes like Arapaho indians, Irish-American, Sami people of northern Finland. A nice touch, I thought, were the three pages devoted to house flags like Getty Oil or Sheraton hotels and the very last pages before the Index a look at yacht flags.
The six hundred flags in the book are shown on well designed pages and obviously all in color. Some readers might find the caption type a bit small but other than that a remarkably comprehensive look at what's at the top of the flagpole, past and present.
There's certainly a photo story here of folk going to Blackpool to enjoy themselves under any circumstances and many of Wallace's photos capture this vulgar abandonement. Unfortunately so many of the seventy-two pictures in the book do this in a rather sloppy way with their badly cropped heads, tilting backgrounds and a lack of focal interest to pull the eye into the frame, making them not much better than snaps anyone could have taken. There are plenty that are not worth a second look either.
The book's production doesn't help either, instead of leaving the photos centred on the page with generous margins several butt into the spine and there are four spreads with them page wide and butting together at the spine
There is a story here but I didn't think Wallace really captures it with his images.
Regular readers of ladies consumer magazines of forties, fifties and
sixties will be familiar with the art of Jon Whitcomb, either through
his paintings for their editorial pages or the ads. His forte was the
female face and the book has page after page of spreads from Collier's,
McCall's, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and especially Cosmopolitan where
he illustrated romantic fiction with a large female face or partial
figure and a man always involved. To a certain extent he seems to have
been type-cast for this role, the paintings were that good. Not just
ladies' faces but children too, pages 146--151 has eighteen covers he
did for Good Housekeeping in 1940 and '41. Later pages have eighteen
Cosmopolitan covers some of which are portraits of movie stars. Whitcomb
was obviously in demand by ad agency Art Directors to use his face
technique for selling, in particular Community Plate used the art for
years to sell their cutlery (eighteen ads are shown).
The book
reveals his life with a thirty page illustrated essay followed by work
examples. It's the magazine fiction spreads that I liked best, if only
there were more. I thought the weakest pages were the forty-two titled
'Jon Whitcomb's Page' from Cosmopolitan during the fifties. Such was his
fame that the magazine gave him a page in each issue to illustrate how
he liked, the art here is much more casual than the tight compositions
used in the fiction or ad illustrations.
Overall an excellent
book about this well known commercial illustrator, I doubt there will be
a better one though I have a couple of comments about the production.
The binding is too tight so that the book really doesn't open flat and
the pages sort of close themselves if the book is left open, Auad
Publishing with illustrator titles on Al Parker or Albert Dorne have much more
user friendly binding. Lots of the reproduced editorial spreads exist as
two pages with a quite noticeable white gap between each page, they
should have been butted together to make an acceptable spread, a quick
bit of Photoshop would have solved this.
