Wednesday 12 April 2023

The graphics of war (4/5)
































 A worthwhile book of 'art' that will interest any graphic artist that does this sort of technical work. I think some of the other reviewers give a misleading impression of the title's content. It certainly isn't a history of the subject but an arbitrary collection of WWII technical illustrations about aircraft from four countries.

Great Britain has the most pages (123) with technical drawings from the RAF Museum in London. An interesting part of these pages is eleven cutaways of the main German warplanes. One of these, the Junkers-JU87 is here and it's also shown as a cutaway in the German pages. The US chapter has two beautiful colored cutaways of the pilot's compartment and armaments of a B-17F. Both of these go beyond the normal technical illustration because they have extensive shading to create a dimensional feel. The Soviet Union has only fourteen pages but it has a good colored renderings of an II-2 Shturmovik cockpit.

The book deals with WWII aviation in the broadest sense, there are the obvious cutaways of planes and engines but also plane recognition charts, the proper handling of equipment when aircraft are on the ground, and several pages in the United Kingdom pages show printed matter relating to abandoning aircraft over land and water.

The book is a pleasant production (printed with a 175 screen on matt art paper) but I was disappointed with the page format. Each spread has an almost an inch-wide colored upright band on the page edge, it serves no purpose and if it wasn't there all the illustrations could have been much larger, so four stars out of five.

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