Vargas Girls - Pin-Ups - Coffee Table Book 2 & 1
(2017 - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)

These two volumes are drastically different, so we will start with the second one since all of its art is presented upright, rather than the non-scoring alternative. It has 40 plates, each faced with a blank page. I count four plates that have some kind of distortion to them - the images have ended up stretched width-wise so that they are broader in that dimension (and only in that dimension). Truth be known, I'd say there were only a small handful of the rest of them that have the sharpness that you are going to want, the remainder seeming a bit wan and indistinct. On our List, recommended before this book are: VARGA (red & blue), VARGA-THE ESQUIRE YEARS-A CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ, THE LITTLE BOOK OF PIN-UP:VARGAS, ALBERTO VARGAS-WORKS FROM THE MAX VARGAS COLLECTION, and VARGAS 20s-50s, and while it is hard to wholeheartedly recommend this book, it has to be admitted that it has 29 new featured images that haven't been presented in those better-scoring volumes.

[-BELOW THE LINE-] 30 plates, each and every one turned sideways. For what it's worth, a majority of them are crisp & clear reproductions, but some suggest to me that they were scanned from some publication use (and I detect in the reproduction of several a distortion ('scrunched' in the horizontal dimension}). The painting on the cover is nice and oriented 'correctly', and three more smaller images are gathered on the back cover. Not much else to say . . .