Alberto Vargas: Varga - The Esquire Years - A Catalogue Raisonné
(1987 - Alfred VanDerMarck Editions)

I really appreciate how this book attempts to gather together all the illustrations, calendars, and military edition extras, executed for Esquire by Alberto Vargas. As it is, the volume of displays makes the book a bit thicker & heavier that optimal, but to even achieve that, a number of exhibits have to share pages, which makes them not 'well-presented' as we score it. So, we count 129 pages (out of the book's 182) featuring their art more singularly, leaving 37 each with gathered multiple images. Another small mis-step here is the two foldouts and 27 other images extending across the book's central gutter, with only a little more than half of them exactly aligned so as to defeat the distortions there, as the beautiful lasses are bifurcated. The upshot is, that as much as I like this book, two other smaller Vargas books, VARGA (BLUE) and VARGA (RED), which sample this exact same art pool, are able to deliver a higher percentage of their pages 'well-presented', score better, and are then both recommended here before this one. With that said, if you already have both of them, this book will still show you 20 additional 'well-presented' works for the first time and give three more even better presentations than previously. A nice treat is the number of extra smaller displays of posters, ads, portraits, etc, that were produced for other projects during that time. A LeRoy Neiman portrait-sketch of Vargas gets shown too. Captioning for most things is adequate, but there are rare instances of exhibits numbered for captions that never appear, and a couple that are not even attempted to be captioned at all. It's worth mentioning that, to our eyes, the reproduction quality in all the books discussed above in this entry is excellent.