“The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001”
I’m of two minds on this book:
- On one hand, this book is filled with *amazing* images… set photos, diagrams and best of all concept paintings that would make damn fine art to hang on the wall. It’s a treasure trove.
- On the other hand… whoever laid out this book needs to have his ass removed.
Quoting from some of the reviews on Amazon:
In what will go down as one of the most horrific decisions in book making history… these amazing and rare photos and illustrations are force fit into pages that have a useable space of about 6 inches wide, and 14 inches tall. This makes presentation of these glorious visuals an impossible task… either the images have to be shrunk to postcard size… or, and this is almost criminal… the image must be split, down the center, across the book spline. OH. MY. GOD. The CENTER of these amazing images… hopelessly lost in the curving folds between adjacent pages.
and…
There ae incredible, beautiful, never before seen wonderful pictures and illustrations, with often interesting notes that fill up the book. VERY SADLY they are almost all cut in half by enlarging them to take up two pages, separated by the books binding. Even the many foldouts have a crease going down otherwise great pictures. This is totally annoying and disappointing and distracting. I guess they wanted the book to look like the Monolith. Instead, it should have looked like a book and given us all these pictures with no “interruptions.”
Basically… WTF were they thinking?
I have high hopes that someone will re-release the imagery in this book in a format that isn’t mind-bogglingly *stupid.*
Sigh.
The people who laid out this book should have used “2001: The Lost Science” as a guide. While not near as much stuff in a book that costs about the same, the format and size of the book is *excellent.*