Gil Elvgren - All His Glamorous American Pin-ups (Martignette)
(1999 - Taschen)

(by Charles G. Martignette & Louis K. Meisel) In its bid to be comprehensive, this book just crowds too many images per page. Out of its 272 pages, only 54 can be said to focus on a large reproduction (and even that's giving a generous pass to ones with still a couple inserted small images included). Then another 158 are each a hodge-podge of several images battling for your attention. Another 17 are the English biography with many small examples of girl-related pin-ups or illustrations of the years being covered (though both John Kacere & Mel Ramos get a large reproduction in this mix). The rest of the tome has interstitial pages, chapter-headers and the text presented again in German & French. My edition was 7-by-9.5-inches in size, but there are other versions that are of the larger 'standard' artbook size that may make the gathering more palatable. There are a number of nudes, but even then, remember that this artist was renowned for the girl-next-door quality he brought to most of his works. Everything is captioned with title (additional titles when necessary) and creation year (if known) and there is an index in the back to all these titles. THE LITTLE BOOK OF PIN-UP:ELVGREN and Artist Archives' ELVGREN GIRLS I & II all scored as better collections of the artist's works, but know that if you already have them, then this volume still has 31 new 'well-presented' paintings not found in them.