Prototype for a decent book, but who wants to buy a prototype?

 

buy cheap Latuda in iowa overnight US Battleships 1941-1963 an Illustrated order Aurogra mastercard Technical Reference

by Wayne Scarpaci

 

 

 

This book is not worth your money. It would make a good sales tool for marketing to a decent publishing house, but this is not a finished product.

It is in woeful need of two editors – one for the author’s words and one for images. The author, on his contents page, has even misnamed one his own paintings, unless of course he did mean “Quite Backwaters”. This is only the first of many typo–“A BB took 5-8 mouths to scrap.” (p. 68)—grammatical, and construction errors that mark the effort as amateurish.

On the surface, the book is a grabber, one that any ship fanatic would feel he couldn’t do without. Who can turn their back on 252 photos, 52 paintings, and 86 line drawings of battleships? Wow! Gotta have it. But wait. That’s 390 images on 134 pages and each page is only 8×10. That’s not a lot of real estate for imagery, let alone any copy. So, the images are all small. It is near impossible to pick out any detail in the author’s paintings or the photographs. Virtually all the photographs are profile, 3/4 bow – stern shots. Very few are detail shots, and the reader is supposed to pick out details from photos barely 2 inches wide.

In a photo book reproduction is paramount. Paper should be pure white, dense enough for no bleed through from the other side of the page, and coated for a precise image. This paper is not white, too thin, and uncoated. The uncoated paper allows the ink to set into the fibers and bleed, producing a blurred image. Further, the author apparently doesn’t know much about imaging line art. All his line drawings have significant artifacts which severely affects their sharpness. They are simply bad. I wish I could comment on his paintings, but they are too small and so poorly reproduced that a valid observation cannot be made. That’s enough comment in itself.

I won’t go into the copy except to say it is basically a rehash of the author’s sources, all the books of which should be readily familiar to anyone even beginning to look at the history of battleships.

Save your money on this incarnation.

If the author ever gets a real publisher this might be worth taking a second look.

 

Reviewed April 2009.