It really should have looked much better.

Top left Half the photo has no relevance as it's a building and the bus is minus the back.
Top right Another badly cropped photo, the bus could have been larger.

Bottom left The photo hasn't been cropped to make the bus upright.

Bottom left The photo could be cropped to remove either side to make the buses larger.
Bottom right No attempt to lighten a very grey photo and the buses could have been larger.

Top right A rather tedious-looking photo of the back of some buses.

To left Why is the Strachans sign angled? Maybe to fill some space.

Bottom left The bus area of the photo is way too small, obviously it has not been cropped.

Top left Was it really worth using this badly taken photo? It hasn't been cropped to
reduce the grass and remove the lady with the ice cream.

Bottom left. A very tedious photo that tells the reader very little.

Top left Who wants to see part of a bus on the right? It should have been cropped out
to make the Leyland National larger.

Top left. I guess this was only used to fill a bit of page space. It's much too large.

Top Another poorly cropped photo. Where is the rest of the bus? 

Was this photo really worth using? 

A blank inside back cover, just the place for the publisher to

plug some other transport titles.

I'm a publication designer and live in the Southampton area and I sometimes use the buses so I thought I would find out about the history of transport services in the city. The book is a typical example of the transport press; it's very amateurishly looking. This type of publication suffers from an inherent problem: it exclusively relies on amateur snaps for the visual content. There are just over two hundred photos in the book and they have just been dropped onto the pages. No cropping to get the best focal point, no lightening of very grey photos, no real editorial selection to reject photos that just aren't worth including and tell the reader very little. Page after page of two photos, one on top of the other. It's also rather pricey.

However, even with this poor visual material, the book could have been designed to give the pages some sparkle, with big and small photos and some worthwhile typography for the title, imprint and intro pages. A missed opportunity to produce a book that a reader could enjoy.

The Art of reflections

Left I always liked this strobe-effect painting.

I can remember seeing these stunning Pontiac ad paintings in the Saturday Evening Post in the sixties and I actually kept a couple of the strobe ads and mounted them on cardboard (still have them somewhere) so this book was an obvious buy for me.

The book's title doesn't refer to Pontiac because it's about the creative work of Art and Van for Mercury, Buick, Pontiac, and Opel. All the cars look remarkable but I thought the Mercury and Buick backgrounds and especially the people, looked rather flat. Van's background and people look much more real in the Pontiac paintings because there is more brushwork to create more rounded figures. On page 116, the painting of a 1964 Bonneville Safari at a ski lodge includes ten people and they look very credible. Incidentally, this painting has had the top and bottom cropped.

The book has an elegant layout and is printed with a two-hundred screen on matt-art paper. I wish, though, that the author had included some largeish thumbnails of the Pontiac brochures the dealers distributed. Both artists (and their three associates) painted dozens of pictures for the brochures, often with cars cropped according to the text. Also, an index would have been useful.

US

Art Fitzpatrick & Van Kaufman: Masters of the Art of Automobile Advertising: Rob Keil: 9780977923625: Amazon.com: Books

Rural nostalgia

Charles Wysocki, like Norman Rockwell, are not names you'll find in books about American Art but both were incredibly popular with the public. Wysocki said he was influenced by the paintings of Joseph Pickett (1848-1918) and there is a distinct similarity, though Pickett's work would be called fine art.

The book is a handsome production with excellent design and printed on a semi-matt gloss paper for the two hundred works by Wysocki. Having developed his style (the bird's-eye view of buildings with very little perspective and smoke from chimneys always a quarter of a circle: nine o'clock to twelve) he stuck with it but away from the rural small town paintngs there are several really impressive still-life compositions that I prefer to the dozens of landscapes. This is probably the only worthwhile book of Wysocki's paintings.