The Forrest J Ackerman Scrapbook - Treasures From The Ackermansion
(2017 - Walker & Anthony Books)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] (edited by Brian Anthony & Bill Walker)(Know that a later near-identical 2022 edition was released by BearManor Media.) Though very active in them professionally, in the Science-Fiction/Fantasy culture realms, Forrest Ackerman was first-and-foremost the über fan & collector, gathering during his career an incredible number of artworks. Like me, you might have thought that a book celebrating the man's eclectic exhibits in his incredible home-turned-museum would certainly feature a very healthy share of his art holdings - and then we would both be wrong. Yes, there are some 62 pages with some illustrative art on them, 21 featuring it in a manner that we'd score as 'well-presented' with the other 40 being gathered conglomerates of photos and/or multiple art-images, but out of a total of the book's over 200 pages, that's too scarce to get this volume up onto The List. Tantalizingly, in the backgrounds of so many of the photographs you can see an overwhelming amount of artwork hung on every available wall-space. I would say that the readers that had visited the 'Ackermansion', or the two subsequent iterations, would love this visual tour of the remembered displays, and the rest of them would be fascinated that there ever existed such a smorgasbord of fantastical celebrity-photos, props, models, costumes, masks, posters, lobby-cards, paintings, drawings and of course books-books-books, open to the drop-by public. The paucity of featured art mentioned above did represent the work of: James Bama (2)***, Ron Cobb*, Virgil Finlay, Basil Gogos, Henry Goode, Bob Juanillo, Bill Nelson, Albert Nuetzell (6), Frank R. Paul, Peter Poplaski, Burt Shonberg, and UNKNOWN ARTIST (5).