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Paper Tiger's Jim Burns books
   Lightship
   Transluminal - The Paintings Of Jim Burns
   Jim Burns - JB [BELOW THE LINE]
                                                                  (Paper Tiger)

Lightship (1985) This was the first monograph devoted to Jim Burns, though he had already done a couple Sci-Fi novellas and novelty books which solely featured his art by that time. First, let me detail the chapters laid out in this book - Men Like Gods, Image Of The Beast, Unfamiliar Territory, Planet Story, More Than Human, The Land Ironclads, The Space Machine, The City And The Stars and The Farthest Shore. Now then, other than the introduction, the large amount of text here is an overview of the science-fiction themes & tropes that those chapter titles would suggest to you. The large scope of Burn's book cover illustrations, even that early in his career, was such that he had more than several examples of each and indeed the writing does occasionally dip into commentary of those works in the context of its thesis. So, you may not get as much art as you would like throughout this 123-page book. 87 pages each feature a large reproduction one of his paintings and another 15 collect two-or-more images. Note that six of the feature pages are utilized for three double-page-spreads, but none are satisfactory as they are laid out across the book's gutter. All are captioned with the story it illustrates, the creation year and the company that produced the publication. This is the highest-ranked collection of Burn's art on The List so far.

Transluminal - The Paintings Of Jim Burns (1999) Bright and colorful, but a bit disappointing. 112 pages with 70 of them featuring a large reproduction and another 18 with multiple images. A pity that 24 of those images are expanded over the book's gutter, many times into a full double-page spread - only two of those become out-and-out losers, but the others are not at their best with the central distortion. It's even more telling when a handful of wraparound paintings are instead held to one page and appear so much better presented that way. 20 pages are taken up by the appreciations of ten well-served authors, each accompanied by a tinted painting excerpt. I should note here that the book's images are grouped together by the authors being illustrated, each captioned with the book/painting's title, the author's name and that book's publisher. Works in the Sci-Fi genre predominate. The Jim Burns collections LIGHTSHIP and IMAGO are both recommended before this one, though I'm still hoping for a more ideal book devoted to him.

Jim Burns - JB (1994) [-BELOW THE LINE-] Wow - Seems like a waste of time to me. Paper Tiger produced at least six different volumes in this "Miniature" format and I guess they had to have identified some market for them. They are *small*, roughly 3-by-4 inches, not big enough to meet the minimum we set for The List here. The book is 42 pages plus an additional double-page image used for the endpapers. So, you are looking at 21 images, nine of them being double-page-spreads (only two of those out-and-out fail in that presentation). Everyone of these images appear (bigger, of course) in the Paper Tiger publication LIGHTSHIP. Some of the images are accompanied by short atmospheric profundities and frequently the LIGHTSHIP chapter-heading spot-drawings. Unless a super-villain has shrunk you down to the size of a toddler, why would you want this ?