Wendell Minor - Art For The Written Word
                                             (1995 - Harcourt, Brace & Co.)  

     This volume is subtitled Twenty-Five Years Of Book Cover Art and is 109 pages of this painter's images in a collection a bit larger than usual at nearly 11-by-11 inches.  A healthy number of those dedicated art pages are utilized to present 17 longer paintings that spread over the center gutter - one suffers in that presentation, but the rest don't seem to, but mostly due to the aspect that the images deliver an emotion-state for which the 'splitting' of some detail is not a deal-killer.  There's another seven pages where multiple images vie for your attention.  Minor's art seems to belong in our grouping here because they are nostalgic, even if we are only touching on the ethereal nostalgia of feelings once felt stronger.  I'm confident that at first blush his work is viewed as simplistic, far from the genre excitement that fills so many of the other volumes here (I know I'm in this camp).  There's a lot of text here (much of it from erudite letters from the word-smiths that had their work graced by one of his covers) that tries to put paid to that simplistic assumption and discusses the many choices made, the avenues discarded, and why the final result seems so gently compelling, working in conjunction with the literary work they accompany.  You might disdain the perceived aspect of 'needing' to be explained, and that's o.k., as long as you still view the work and allow it to speak to you in the language you prefer.

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