Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a sad moment. I can't sugar coat it. This volume is for the most part a picture book filled with illustrations and photographs, many which I had never seen (which is saying something, as I am well studied in 2001: a space odyssey). BRILLIANT research and lovely photos. This review will focus on this aspect of the book. The book comes in a rather astounding format... and as 6.9x15x1.6... clearly meant to resemble the monolith and its famous 1:4:9 ratio. And I thought, "Brilliant... artful and will allow the wide Cinemascope imagery (at 2.21:1 or 2.35:1)... requiring that the book be held wide left to right to resemble a cinema screen. In a decision that will go down in book history as unfathomably stupid, the book is instead "broken" and hinged sitting tall. It feels much like reading a double tall version of a newspaper. This format is fine for reading the accompanying text. 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. (see accompanying photos to this review). These images might have been a gold mine for scale model references... or just appreciated for their historical value or beauty... but are now marred by being split in two. In an apparent effort to deal with this madness, there are many fold out pages, but even these have a crease, and the printing ink on my copy was not happy to remain on the paper at these folds... leaving a white line at the crease. Given we are dealing with a visual film of space, white lines cutting vertically through black are somewhat noticeable! To top it off, the paper seems to be of questionable quality. Generally, coffee table books like these are on heavy high gloss paper, but this paper is decidedly dull and brings a lifeless quality to the images. I wish I had better news about this book. If you can stand to have your heart crushed by how these astounding and rare images are defiled, then I suppose you might consider adding this title to your library. This book screams loudly for another edition... reformatted, in an orientation and aspect fitting to the heart of the work: the visual material.