Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls - The Art Of Robert A. Maguire
                                             (2009 - Dark Horse)  

      (by Jim Silke)    Because of his frequently startling use of color, paperbacks with Robert Maguire covers seemed to "jump out" and demand your attention on the bookstore shelves.  After way too many years, this monograph finally came along and gathered together many of those works in one incredibly colorful volume.  This 112-page book uses 67 of them to display large reproductions of his pieces, almost all from the original paintings.  Then there are another 36 pages that show the covers of over a hundred of the books that his work adorned - most of those are thrillers or trashy novels for which his lively & dramatic characters were 'born' to populate.  (There's one image that spreads across the central gutter, in o.k. fashion since it was a wrap-around book cover).  One section of this collection also delves into the historical & romance paintings that made up a large part of his later career, as well as the mainstream novels one might say he 'graduated' to.  Caption-wise, the book covers are allowed to speak for themselves, while the original paintings are identified as to what story they were illustrating.  I should mention that there is a not-insignificant amount of attention paid to model photographs, thumbnails, sketches and preliminaries which, in my jaundiced view, just took space with which more of his finished art or even covers could have been exhibited.  The last illustrated section devotes a few pages to convey his working techniques & methods.  Don't confuse this book with the similarly-titled classic-paperback-cover overview: Dames, Dolls & Delinquents.

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