The Art Of Rafael DeSoto
(2019 - Illustrated Press)

(by David Saunders) A 9-by-12-inch, 224-page book, a little on the hefty side, but a real gift for the lovers of exciting drama. 175 of those pages present their art pieces as large as the margins will allow, with most of those being the artist's original paintings rather than publication-scans (which are top-notch as well). Then another 31 pages have several images vying for your attention. Some may find annoying that a number of the paintings have been overlayed with a small image of the resulting published cover. All these displays are divided into three sections, his pulp-magazine work, then later magazines (men's adventure and otherwise), and finally the paperbacks. They've provided a checklist of the pulps credited to him and a very substantial biography. All the presented covers are captioned with publication title & date, then the cover painting captions also supply the medium & size. There's also a number of magazine interior illustrations whose captions provide the medium, but almost never the source-story or where it appeared (I think because they are just working from the images of the originals). Genre-wise, it's really nice to see works from westerns, sports, detective, thriller, horror, sci-fi, man's adventures, dangerous females and that seedy part of town . . .