Customer Reviews

Hot Shoes: One Hundred Years

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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 .

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"?