The Art Of John Willie - Sophisticated Bondage - Book One & Two
                                             (1989 / 1990 - Glittering Images)  

   (edited by Richard Morrocchi & Stefano Piselli)   Not appropriate for children and adolescents.  The first volume, BOOK ONE or THE FIRST BOOK OF. . . is the better of the two.  (It seems the cover of an earlier edition of BOOK ONE does not have the typography of being the first of a multi-volume set, but the cover art is the same.)  It makes it up onto The List by a whisker, as 72 of the volume's 128 pages are given over to text in Italian & French and a lot of bondage photography (I mean, really, how many different pictures of Pat tying up her roommate Jill, in order steal her blind date, did a customer want ?  And then a whole other set vice-versa ?).  The paintings & drawings may still be controversial, but the real-life black-&-white pictures, with the lamest of backdrops, just seem sad, tawdry and a little bit disturbing.  Anyway, 26 of the 54 art pages are large/full-page reproductions of Willie's drawings or watercolors (actually one of these is an example of Guido Crepax's work in a similar vein . . .) with the rest being multiple-image gatherings.  The fetishism of the art (and the many photographs) makes this a book to definitely keep away from the young ones.

     [-BELOW THE LINE-]  (edited by Richard Morrocchi & Stefano Piselli)   The second volume is even less of an art book in the way we mean it, splitting its focus again with the artist's proficiency as a bondage photographer and now also reprinting runs of SWEET GWENDOLINE and SIR DYSTIC D'ARCY sequential art.  A small number of those pages are full-page spreads and there are a few spot drawings featured off-handedly throughout.  The book details that the original artworks were watercolors, but they were published in half-tone (as are the reproductions here).  Commentary appears in English, Italian and French.  There are a couple of other books collecting John Willie's output, but I don't know if any of them put the spotlight adequately on the unique drawn & painted images he produced.

Other Glittering Images releases

  The Golden Age Of Pin-Up Art books 1 & 2

  The Art Of Saudelli - Bondage & Foot Fantasies

  The Art Of Stanton - Master Of Bizarre - Book One

  Baldazzini & Saudelli's Bizarreries Book 1  [BELOW THE LINE]

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