Hot Shoes: One Hundred Years [Hardcover]

Maureen Reilly (Author), John Klycinski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1998

Explore women's shoes as a powerful talisman of fashion, culture, and sexual energy. With 500 original color photographs, and two dozen vintage illustrations, this book tells the real story of Hot Shoes: One Hundred Years. These are the shoes real women wore, and loved enough to save. You'll see designer shoes by the likes of David Evins and Palter De Liso, who were influenced by haute couture but marketed to the upper middle-class. Since this is a book for collectors, you'll find a true cross-section of shoe design. There are coquettish pumps from the French Room at Chandler's, jeweled platforms by Frank More of San Francisco, and early canvas high-button shoes by Keds. Each photo caption includes a value range, and each photo is lavishly styled, in the same manner as the author's previous book from Schiffer Publishing: Collectible Women's Hats of the 20th Century.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Along with shopping for shoes and writing about vintage fashion, Maureen Reilly spends her days as a full-time lawyer, wife, and mother. This is Maureen's second book, coming on the heels, as it were, of Collectible Women's Hats of the 20th Century from Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Schiffer Publishing (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764304356
• ISBN-13: 978-0764304354
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 11.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,468,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A disappointing addition to the literature on shoes, December 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Hot Shoes: One Hundred Years (Hardcover)

Having ordered by catalog three copies of this title before it was released, I was truelly disappointed when they arrived. An expensive book, it suffers greatly from amateurish and often out of focus photographs as well as poor design. The photographs are badly set up, with distracting superfluous props which obscure the object of interest - the shoe. Given that this is primarily a picture book rather than a textual history, it is ironic that the photographs are so inferior. Where shoes are modeled, they often appear ill fitting, or are shown in inexplicable full figure shots where you cannot see them well, detracting rather than adding to the allure of what could be fabulous shoes. The inexpensive books on the same subject by Linda O'Keefe or Pattison & Cawthorne stand far above this recent addition .

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I have to agree, April 7, 2002

By 

Anthony D'Atri "Anthony11" (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hot Shoes: One Hundred Years (Hardcover)

I pretty much agree with the former reviewer. I didn't find the photos to be out of focus, but indeed some of them are shot eg. with such bad lighting and bad composition that they can't be made out at all. Others don't even come close to matching their captions, and the inexplicable big black boxes on several pages are just weird. The neverending use of obscure French terms (some of which aren't even in the glossary) comes off as rather pretentious.

Why does a book whose cover says "With Values" include so many that are valued as simply "Special"?