Robert McGinnis is one of America's most gifted illustrators and the breadth of his talent was well-documented in his art book, TAPESTRY. Pin-ups, Westerns, movie posters--the guy could paint it all. THE PAPERBACK COVERS OF ROBERT MCGINNIS, though featuring several paintings as well as pencil roughs and a couple of photo references, is not an art book, but rather is a rather pricey checklist geared toward paperback collectors. The majority of the color works are small reproductions of the actual covers as they originally appeared--and the focus is firmly on McGinnis' detective covers with the other genre's he's worked in getting barely a nod. Even so, I would have preferred to see large reproductions of the artist's trademark femme fatales unmarred by titles instead of the plethora of tiny second-generation reproductions found in this volume: the format and content is geared SO much toward the hardcore collector mentality that the editors/authors seemed to have lost track of the ART and the ARTIST they supposedly revere. A disappointment.

Well, right off the bat let me just say that if you are a Robert McGinnis fan, you must have this book. The production standards are terrific and the reproductions of paintings, from the originals, are as crisp and eye-popping as you always hope for in an art book. The book is also a valuable companion volume to "Tapestry" released. last year and covers completey new ground in terms of illustrations reproduced. All this said, I do have a quibble with the thought that went into the layout. Fine coated art paper is used throughout and what did the authors do? They filled up huge portions of this gorgeous paper with a complete checklist of McGinnis paperback covers, rather than the illustrations us fans were looking for. The checklist is a valuable tool for those who wish to compile a complete library of McGinnis paperbacks, (say, 5% of the people who love the work of McGinnis), but it could easily have fit at the back of the book on cheaper stock, which would have left room for dozens (if not hundreds) of color McGinnis covers. Oh well! Still good, but it was "this close" to being great!

After picking up the superlative TAPESTRY: THE PAINTINGS OF ROBERT MCGINNIS, I took a chance on THE PAPERBACK COVERS OF ROBERT MCGINNIS to see if it would be worthwhile as well.

I had some doubts THE PAPERBACK COVERS would be a good use of my money, since it sounded like it was just a grab-bag collection of cover scans that might or might not be very clean, but that wasn't what I got. It's actually basically a text listing of all the paperback covers RFM ever did, with pages showing selected groups of covers, plus background material and a number of full-page paintings.

The book's layout is clean, and so are the prints, though the cover copies are (necessarily) on the small side. However, the full-page prints are worth the price of admission. If you have to choose between TAPESTRY and PAPERBACK COVERS, I'd say pick up TAPESTRY hands-down, but if you have TAPESTRY then PAPERBACK COVERS makes a very nice accessory.