From Tolkien to Oz: The Art of Greg Hildebrandt by William McGuire

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I want to make clear that my low rating is in no way related to the beauty or quality of Greg Hildebrandt's artwork which I think is wonderful. If I were rating the book based soley on his art, it would easily earn five stars. Instead, my rating is based on the book in general and as an artbook, it falls short.

I collected several of Hildebrandt's illustrated books long ago, and unlike his editions of Dracula or Poe, the publisher chose to make this in a landscape format. This would be great if the illustrations at least filled the page, but they almost never do. More often than not, three to five pictures are crammed onto the page making them so small that you have to practically put your nose to the paper to take in all the details. This is not what you expect in an artbook. These wonderful images should have a page to themselves.

And then there's the text. While I enjoyed Hildebrandt's quotes and the captions relating to specific works (I would have preferred more of them), we occasionally come to a page of text introducing us to the next section of the book. These are all terrible. The exception is the opening which gives a nice overview of Greg Hildebrandt's life and work. The book ends with a short interview, but almost all of the questions relate to answers we already have from the introduction (e.g. Who influenced you as an artist?, a question well detailed in the opening). Since the book is unfairly listed as being "by William McGuire" (I say unfair since it's really by Hildebrandt and the text is only there to support the art, not the other way around), I must place the blame for the terrible text sqaurely on him.

I will nevertheless treasure this along with all my other Hildebrandt art books, but this book could have been so much better.



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