Reel art 5/5

This chunky, heavy book is a superb collection of posters. The back pages bibliography lists eleven poster books by the author and I assume their contents are all in this title. Individually, the graphics of pop culture are not particularly interesting, but when collected together, whether it's book jackets, record and magazine covers, movie posters, and so on, they take on a cool fascination and with a thousand-plus here, it's a real page-turner.

I thought the editorial format worked really well. Each poster is dated and frequently the artist and designer are credited. The author has researched background information about many of these creatives for short essays on most pages. A lovely addition are black and white publicity photos of stars from the thirties and forties that were clearly used by artists for the poster. 

Book designer Graham Marsh has cleverly presented all this colorful material in a very easy on the eye style, with a poster or two a page and for a change of pace (essential in highly visual books) occasionally nine.

This could be the definitive movie poster book. I doubt it could be improved on.

US

1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times: Nourmand, Tony, Frayling, Christopher, Elangasinghe, Alison: 9781909526938: Amazon.com: Books

UK

1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times: Amazon.co.uk: Nourmand, Tony, Frayling, Christopher: 9781909526938: Books

 

INDEX 2025

 

Funnies for the millions 5/5

 

The fifteen cartoonists from the first few decades of the last century are well known enough to have their own Wikipedia entries, except for two, though: Walt Bradford and George Swanson. Several of the thirteen are rightly famous enough to have retrospectives of their work published, but it's interesting that these titles were really only published in the last few years. I'm thinking of Goldberg, Herriman, Segar and Gross. Publishers have realized that their work is historically worth revealing to a new audience.

Paul Tumey must have done a lot of research to gather so much detail about long-dead cartoonists and found copious examples of their work. I thought one of the strengths of the book is the pages and pages of newspaper strips from each artist and nicely in color; if that's how they originally appeared. No doubt everyone will have their faves, mine is George Herriman with his Stumble Inn, a sort of forerunner to his brilliant Krazy Kat.

I was pleasantly surprised at how good this book looks owing to the design efforts of Dean Mullaney and Lorraine Turner. There is a lot of attention to detail that many other publishers wouldn't bother with. If you want to know what millions laughed at and long before Mad magazine and the National Lampoon, the work of these great cartoonists will fill you in.

US

SCREWBALL! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny: Tumey, Paul C.: 9781684051878: Amazon.com: Books

UK

SCREWBALL! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny : Tumey, Paul, Tumey, Paul: Amazon.co.uk: Books

CONOCO puts its best foot forward 5/5

An excellent corporate history of Conoco. I'm a publication designer and I have a few similar books. They are the ideal commission for a designer. Money isn't too important as it's a PR job. The book is probably seventy percent pictorial, mostly photos but also paintings of past CEO's and some graphic ephemera. Author Russ Banham pulls a lot of financial and technical information together for a reasonable read.

The production is first-class (only to be expected, of course) well printed on a semi-matt paper. There is an Index over the last five pages. I must admit I'm not quite sure who would buy a copy. I assume most Conoco employees got a free copy and I bought it because I have a professional interest in the production.