PIN-UP CLASSIX:
THE GREAT
AMERICAN PIN-UP
What have you been waiting for all your life that weighs six pounds and will take three nights to finish? (Hint: it's not a stash of pot.)

The Great American Pin-Up takes a comprehensive look at an enduring national art form--and you won't find any better forms than these! Not a peek but a long, hard stare at the cream of the cream makes the new, heavyweight volume a standout success.

Art collector Charles Martignette and gallery owner Louis Meisel (who championed two magnificent photorealism books) fused their interests and efforts to generate a historic overview of pin-up art with a range and authority beyond most similar attempts. But the real heart of their offering is the images--and the authors are careful to allow nothing to short circuit the book's visual appeal.

Huge 9-1/2 x 13" pages showcase super-quality color reproductions often as large as the original calendars or reduce them to playing-card size and assemble nine sizzlers to a page. The vitality of the presentation is enhanced by the choice of material--more than 900 images were obviously boiled down from thousands of possibilities to deliver the most colorful, best rendered, and sexiest pin-ups ever created. In other words, this is IT!

The 384-page collection spotlights 23 master illustrators, from Rolf Armstrong to Zoe Mozert, affording each with a biographical sketch, photographic portrait, and a gallery of their most outstanding works. To cap the study, 29 additional craftsmen are highlighted, each given up to four pages of prime examples of their style.

Many of the images shown are from the original paintings, yet even those taken from calendars, blotters, and cards are reproduced as bright and sharp as their source material--and often better. Because choice examples of glamour ephemera are selling as high as $400, the value of the images culled in the hardbound chronicle is astronomical. And since the Age of the Classic Pin-Up ended in the '60s, the book will remain the definitive resource for collectors, aficionados, and lovers of cheesecake art as long as watching windblown skirts and flashing thighs are national pastimes.

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