Customer Reviews

Domus, Volume 4, 1955-1959

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First of all, before you even think about buying any of the 12 volumes of the Taschen Domus series of that Italian architecture and interior design magazine, make sure that you have already spent money on buying a GOOD magnifying glass and a GOOD Italian-English dictionary. If the dictionary does not have Italian verb charts and a grammar section then you will need to buy a separate Italian grammar book. (I ended up having to buy one, and chose the Collins Italian Concise Dictionary, 5th Edition, which has 884 pages of easy to read and extensive definitions PLUS another 229 pages of Italian verb charts and explanations of Italian grammar. It is paperback and retails new for US $17.99 .) Why spend the time, effort, and money on a dictionary and magnifying glass for Taschen Domus volumes that are touted as "bilingual"? The simple answer is that many things in them are NOT TRANSLATED into English and/or impossible to read as they were shrunk considerably from the originals. Space here does not allow me to review all 12 volumes but I will provide you with SPECIFIC EXAMPLES from 4 of the volumes that begin with the first volume ("VOL I")which covers the years from 1928-1939 through Volume 11 ("VOL XI") which goes into the 1990s. In the first volume, pages 136 through 141, only the title of the article and two other sentences are translated into English, out of the many paragraphs that were written in the original Italian. Also page 141 shows four entire original pages and their photos that were shrunk to fit into just one new page, and of course this newer and smaller format is very hard to read. The editors of the new Taschen edition wasted a lot of blank space, approximately one fourth of each page, in the Preface (pages 6-17) to this volume and instead could have used it to have more translations and/or full sized photos/articles. The other volumes have more of these same problems and some additional problems: Starting on page 297 of Volume 5 ("Vol V"), (1960-1964), and for a total of 5 pages which include 11 photographs and 2 line drawings with only 2 of the photos in color of the then new US embassy in Karachi, Pakistan, designed by the famous architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. Two of the black and white photos were shrunk to a ridiculous 2 inches by 1 inch ! The so called "translation" is on page 558 (You will be doing a lot of inconvenient flipping back and forth!) and consists only of 6 sentences in English whereas the original Italian is more than 3 times as long. That the Taschen editors of these volumes made the choice to leave out translations is particularaly troublesome because they chose to include in each Taschen volume several full page advertisements for such things as typewriters (pages 45, 181 in Vol V), cars, lights, etc. They also made the choice to leave out many, many, entire articles and sometimes entire months out of the 12 original monthly issues each year of Domus; the Taschen editors only included approximately 100 pages for EACH entire year! In Volume 6 ("Vol VI"), (1965-1969), on page 46 there is a 6 page article with the title "Neutra Quasi In Italia" and is translated at the bottom of the page as "Neutra Nearly In Italy" and then the Taschen editors then chose to include a full page (!) black and white photo of Neutra with the enlightening caption of "Portrait of Richard Neutra" but at the same time chose to shrink SIX pages of that original rare 1965 article into TWO pages with some of the photos only one and a half inches square (!) and even worse; NONE of the many paragraphs written in Italian were translated ! The quality of the color photos is poor in these volumes; many are very grainy and not sharply in focus; even the US mass-produced and inexpensive magazine "Better Homes and Gardens" had better quality of color photography in the 1960s than these exclusive and expensive Domus ones. The other volumes in this Taschen set of reprinted magazine issues suffer from most of these same problems, for example: Volume 11, ("VOL XI") on page 82 from the May 1990 issue, reduced four full original pages into just one new page and greatly reduced the photographs, two of which are now approximately only one inch by one inch ! Also, ALL of the June, July, and August 1990 original editions were COMPLETELY OMITTED in the Taschen edition. On page 180 of Vol XI there is a full page absurd advertisement for a "door fitting" and page 566 is mostly blank with only TWO words on it, page 572 is 3/4 blank and page 572 is 100% blank. In other words, Taschen COULD have and SHOULD have omitted the blank pages etc and then would have had more space to print more and larger reporductions of the original issues. These volumes that cover the last 20 years or so do have better quality color than the photos in the volumes that cover the 1960s etc, as detailed above. Thank you for taking the time to read my review in its entirety.