Customer Reviews

Peep-Machine Pin-Ups: 1940s-1950s Mutoscope Art (Schiffer Book with Values)

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If you are looking to view the authors' collection of 230 Mutoscope Pin-Up cards, nicely reproduced, this is the book for you. If you want more information, look elsewhere.
There is a cursory history of Mutoscope cards and brief biographies of 4 artists represented, but that's it. No information on how many were made (386); over what period of time (1940-1954); how they were grouped (10 sets of 32 or 64 cards with 2 extras). It would have been nice to have a complete checklist and information on how to identify the various sets. Instead of being ordered by year or set, the authors put them alphabetically according to the cute quotes on the cards: from "A Clothes Call" to "You're The Top". There are Internet references, but you could have done that anyway, right? I am waiting for the complete reference guide. Anyone step up?

I was always curious about Mutoscope cards and having bought the book I'm still curious. It seems cards were dispensed from coin-operated machines for mere pennies but the book doesn't picture the machines or tell me how they were dispensed or, as another reviewer has mentioned, how many different sets there were.

The 128 pages feature the pin-up cards printed in 175dpi and presented in a very boring layout, not even a thin grey drop shadow to give them a lift on the page. On the cover the thumbnail cards do have a depth shadow added though. The first few pages have some very skimpy text about the cards and the four artists who painted most of the artwork throughout the book.

I thought this was a rather expensive publication but if you like pin-up art there is a better book available. For a third of the price to can get Taschen's The Great American Pin-Up (Midi) which has hundreds of pictures and although I haven't checked I bet all these Mutoscope pin-ups are included (there is also a large coffee-table version of this wonderful book).