Future Perfect: Book Review

Future Perfect: Vintage Futuristic Graphics (ed. Jim Heimann. Koln: Taschen, 2002) is one of publisher Taschen's series of nicely-produced paperbacks collecting images on various themes. On a purely physical level, it's a very well-constructed paperback, built almost as sturdily as a hardcover. Although the pages are glued and not sewn, the glue seems to be better than the usual paperback glue. The cover is stiffer than a standard paperback, with actual paste-down endpapers and endbands. In other words, it's a book that feels good in the hand and that will stand up to repeated flipping-through.

And sturdiness is a must for this book because, although it has very little text (just a three-page introduction by Bruce McCall, in three languages), the images invite frequent browsing. The whole book (except the introduction, and images that were originally black and white) is in full-colour and the reproduction--as is usual for Taschen books--is fantastic. Every halftone dot is visible and wrinkles and tears in the original images can be spotted here and there. The images themselves come from sources like Popular Science and Modern Mechanix and Inventions and include cover art, illustrations and advertisements. One of my few criticisms of this book is that none of the images have information about where they came from, or even their date (except, of course, the ones that show the whole cover of a magazine). That's not a problem if you just want to enjoy the pictures, but if you want to actually do some research, it becomes a very big problem.

My only other criticism is that many of the images are cropped, and there's no way to tell how much of the image has been left out. OK, one more: it would be nice if the book were physically larger, but then it would have to be correspondingly more expensive.

Overall, I'm delighted with Future Perfect. It's a great reference for getting a feel for the raygun gothic style and fun to flip through and think about how enthusiastic we were for the future to come. If only each image had a provenance (even just a list at the back of the book), it would be nearly, um, perfect. I'm not going to complain, though. Someone left the book lying abandoned at my old art school, so I got it free (I'd have bought it in a bookstore, though, if I hadn't).

Click here to buy Future Perfect from Amazon.com