Larry Freeman

While the artwork contained in this volume ranges from interesting to positively awesome, the beauty of this collection of Victoriana and Art Nouveau is marred by the book's downright pathetic writing, editing, and typesetting.

The book reprints hundreds of posters, trade cards, billboards, and other assorted media from the period extending roughly from 1815 to 1915. There are some real beauties in here, from the gorgeous posters of Art Nouveau's finest theatrical designers (Mucha, Beardsley, Penfield, et al.), to the simple, straightforward creations churned out by the nineteenth century's anonymous mass of advertising artists, extolling the virtues of everything from snake oil and meat grinders to transcontinental trips on the Rock Island Line.

Meanwhile, the integumentary text reads as though written by an aphasic five-year-old, with inept analysis, repetitive unenlightened commentary, and enough typographic and editorial errors to fill five volumes its size. Captions are misplaced, often repeated out of context a dozen pages later; whole blocks of text are cut free of their moorings and float about pointlessly, promised passages never appear, and solecisms shoot up like crocuses in spring. The author is simultaneously pompous and ignorant, at his best tiresome and at his worst unreadable. Though the book purports to be informative, I learned next to nothing by reading it.

In short, enjoy the pictures, and ignore the text. The best use one could make of this book is to cut out and frame some of the more wonderful of the images it contains.… (mer)