Customer Reviews

Domus, Volume 6, 1965-1969

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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 buying the Collins Italian Concise Dictionary, 5th Edition, which has 884 pages of easy to read & 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 & 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. EXAMPLES: Starting on Page 297 of Volume 5 ("Vol V"), (1960-1964), and for a total of 5 pages with 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 architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. Two of the black and white photos were shrank to a ridiculous 2 inches by 1 inch! The so called "translation" in on Page 558 (You will be doing a lot of inconvenient flipping back and forth!) and consists of 6 sentences in English whereas the original Italian is more than 3 times as long. That the editors of these newer 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 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 shrank SIX pages of that original 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; many are very grainy and not sharply in focus. The other volumes suffer from most of these same problems, for example: Volume 11 ("XI") on page 82 from May 1990 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 573 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 reproductions of the original issues. These volumes that cover the past 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 reading my review in its entirety.