Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life
by Charley Harper, Todd Oldham
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charley Harper, Todd OldhamEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-23
ISBN: 0978607651
Number of pages: 424
Publisher: AMMO Books
Book Reviews of Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life
Book Review: disgraceful quality for the size and price - buy the smaller one
Summary: 2 Stars
Rating here is for the book quality, printing, and value, not content and design. The content is great and the book is nicely designed and has some good photos and useful information to help you understand Harper, it's just horribly reproduced here in a low quality binding.
I don't usually write reviews but felt compelled on this one because of the shock I felt when I examined this allegedly $200 book!
I was thinking of $pending the money on the big version (this one), so took a look at the local university library since I was kind of excited to see it.
Though it's a recent acquisition there and looks like it hadn't had much use and had never been checked out, the binding is already pulling away from the (cardboard, not cloth) binding. The binding looks more like one on those 'bargain' books made to be sold cheap in stripmalls than one on a $200 book - I would expect this book will tear from the cover at some point!
Also, the print quality is very disappointing for the asking price.
The first thing I noticed was fuzzy images on many pages where the offsets didn't line up (in the book printing rather than the original artwork or duplication). At first I thought it was maybe from the original art, but looking closer I saw a lot of misaligned halftoning on the page and other evidence of poor quality printing. Some of the art is obviously reproduced from pages of the Ford Times, presumably because that was all that was available, which is more understandable in a cheap magazine than an expensive art book.
Worse still, many of the images have very visible 'jpeg artifacts' - distortion from over-compressing the digital images at some point in the production and/or using lower than necessary scan/photo resolution (another problem with the modern over reliance on 'desktop publishing' methods for the production of books that used to be done with much greater care!)
The text on many prints, though they should be big enough to be readable in the size, are just blurs... This might be less noticeable if viewed from across the room, in dark light, while drunk - but this isn't how I like to enjoy folio-sized art books!
The colors are also rather dull in this printing, I suspect duller than the originals, and surely less spectacular than the few posters I've seen.
The pages showing the National Park posters, for one example of many, are just awful here - blurry with annoying 'digital' distortion that renders them almost ugly (if one didn't love the original art supposedly portrayed), at the very least vastly disappointing. The Glacier Bay one, which I know fairly well, is so dark, muddy, and blurry here that it's painful to look at.
So, a poor quality weak cardboard binding, poor printing, dull colors, digital compression artifacts, and low resolution images told me all I needed to know in about 5 minutes.
It's a shame (on the part of the publisher and in the memory of the artist) that they didn't go with a better printer (perhaps going with a Chinese printer as they did was cheaper, but it obviously resulted in a poor quality book) and produce something that would justify a $200 price tag (even at $100 this is overpriced due to the many quality issues). This is most certainly *not* a quality book in the tradition of expensive art books.
So I think I'll take a $35 chance on the smaller one. Another reviewer mentioned the colors look better in that one in part because of coated paper vs. the matte used here.
I hope that they didn't use an even lower quality image for the smaller version, as printing at half the size of the large version may go far to hide the flaws so evident in the larger version (just like a 50k jpeg image may look good in a small website but awful fullscreen). In fact, the text size, as well as the many flaws in the printing make this book look like it was prepared for a smaller print size and then for some reason printed twice the intended size. It'd've been a much more exciting volume in the large size if it were prepared and printed nicely, but I see no advantage in this format size over something half as big, unless the smaller one is even worse!
And I hope the binding in the smaller version is a lot better suited to holding the pages in the cover, as this large one is not.
At the very least I'd've only spent $35 and not 3 or 6 times that much to be disappointed!
Summary of Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life
Charley Harper was an American original. For over six decades he painted colorful and graphic illustrations of nature, animals, insects and people alike, from his home studio in Cincinnati, Ohio until he passed away in 2007 at the age of 84. Renowned New York based designer Todd Oldham rediscovered Charley's work in 2001, and collaborated closely with him in the ensuing years; combing through his extensive archive to edit and design this stunning monograph. This coffee table tomb is a beautiful tribute to Charley Harper's singular style, which he referred to as Minimal Realism.Artists, A-Z Books
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