Tom Lovell Illustrator
(2019 - Illustrated Press)

(by Daniel Zimmer) This 9-by-12-inch volume is just a bit unwieldy at 224 pages. Really hard to complain though, seeing how almost all of any excess pages are filled with Lovell's art. First, 14 of the book's pages are given over to seven double page spreads, all remaining satisfactory (if not ideal in some cases) in that presentation. Then, a walloping 177 pages feature large reproductions of the artist's works. Now, a healthy number of those are exhibits of the resulting double-page magazine-story openings that are largely his art, held to a single page here - being long & thin, the remaining space on the page is always filled with *another* long & thin piece. 12 more pages each take an excerpted portion of a presented painting and blow it up to a full-bleed display. Still another 16 pages gather multiple smaller images together. And there's no deficiency in the amount of biographical text that is woven through the featured art. So much of what's here are his paintings, so in the captioning of those, which does provide the use-type of the illustration, magazine name (sometimes), medium & image-source, they decided to not share almost any illustrated story's title, which I think is a shame (because that can, in many cases, provide just a little context for the image we are looking at). The book is absolutely full of beautiful men and women traipsing throughout (usually in the morass of the trials & tribulations of relationships and romance, along with all the pensive glances, hand-ringing and, yes, adventurous trappings, that come with such stories), because they represent the strong majority of these presentations. I don't want to slight the equally strong diversity of the remainder, with its subjects of combat, crime, survival, historical drama and advertising, not to mention the coverage of his earlier work in adventure, western & mystery pulp covers & illustrations. The book closes with a smattering of the many paintings Lovell spent that last portion of his career delivering to the western fine-art market. Note that this volume scores as better than the other Lovell collection on The List here, but there are very few repeats found there.