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Norman Rockwell - Illustrator
(1946 - Watson-Guptill Publications)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] (by Albert L. Guptill) This was a book first published in 1946 and then jazzed up a little bit for re-release in the 1970s (Ballantine Books distributed the soft-cover edition). Its 80 pages of text can attest to the extent how much information about Rockwell is conveyed, but the book doesn't make the grade in art presentation. (Three-quarters of those text pages do have some small spot illustration or other). Over 50 pages are devoted to photographs or black-&-white reproductions of color works (notably 26 pages of Saturday Evening Post covers presented nine-to-page). That leaves only 54 pages of large well-presented art-pieces, usually a painting or a preliminary rough for one. 14 of those are used to present seven long horizontal works as double-page spreads - none are ruined by the gutter, but they're not that impressive when all is said & done. There are another 11 pages with multiple drawings. Captioning is usually some kind of title and the size of the original, often along with an accompanying anecdote or commentary. While there are still plenty of collections that I haven't seen yet, currently, there are 12 'well-presented' pieces here that haven't been found so in all of the volumes up on The List now.