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Mark Harrison's Dreamlands
(1990 - Paper Tiger)

Let's start with the fact that within this 128-page volume, 34 large images dominate one page, but then are allowed to span over the book's central gutter to the neighboring one (many times into a full double-page-spread). Only five of those out-&-out fail because of the center distortion, mainly because so many are showing off his sweeping vistas that captured so many people's imaginations, but from my perspective, that's not a winning presentation strategy. Anyway, another 39 pages each feature their own large reproduction, and another handful display multiple images. Many of the art pages also contain some text and 14 more are purely such, all of which is providing a small biography and a lot of the artist's own thinking about the hows & whys of his works, as well as his very unscripted career. Again, uppermost is his use of fantastical landscape in illustrating not only SF/Fantasy stories, but also backgrounding enjoyably allegorical conveyances for other genres, like Mystery and Literature. You may be beginning to suspect that all the paintings here are for book covers, and you'd be right. Everything is captioned with the book titles, publishers and creation-years. At this writing, Harrison is still going strong and has designed & released a couple of more recent collections of his work. So while this is a pretty good early exhibit, hopefully his own books do an even better job of displaying his work.