Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Fruit Label Book (Schiffer Books)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I went through a phase where I collected fruit box labels. I enjoyed the imagery and the sense of nostalgia. These labels harken back to a simpler, more rural and natural time. You can just feel yourself relaxing as your eyes gaze over the images from our largely bygone agricultural America. I've since moved on to collecting rock concert posters, but it was from fruit box labels that I learned my love for beautiful, idyllic imagery. This book will have you immediately yearning for eating a juicy apple in a grassy, flower-saturated meadow alongside a frolicking maiden, so stock up on those. The apples, that is.

As someone else has mentioned, this book is primarily about produce from Washington state. I'd say it is about 90% dedicated to apples, and there are some pears as well. There are about six pictures per page, so they are small images, but they are still large enough that you can enjoy the image and feeling. I do wish there were a few full-page images, just to shake things up visually a little. This almost feels like a catalog in certain respects. And, there is actually quite a bit of image redundancy, due to the fact that the same image was used on several labels with minor derivations in peripheral details. For a collector this might be extremely valuable so you can identify diffferent versions of a given label image.

You definitely don't have any citrus portrayed here, and I don't think there is anything from California or Florida. So "Ultimate" is clearly hyperbole. The book is lacking in a type of dimension I had hoped it would have. This is basically a book with a lot of beautiful pictures of apples. To me, that's still a good thing, as far as it goes.

The print quality here is first rate, just splendid. Paper quality is first rate.

So far, I'd still give the book five stars. My gripe?? The absolutely cheap and disgraceful shiny cardboard cover they put on the book. This is the kind of cover which you find on a child's Dr. Suess book, not a label collector's book which itself should become a collectible. Really, such a major mistake: someone's head should roll at Schiffer Publishing. And, look at the price: for this price you should get a book which will last for generations. Instead, they sell you a book which almost certainly will be in tatters in a few years if it get any regular use at all. Given the low quality cover and binding, this book should be priced at about one-third its current asking price.

The art of bookbinding and book-making seems to be going the way of the American automobile. This book represents the Ford Pinto-fication of the American book publishing industry. Huge, horrible corners cut, with some scheming conniver just hoping we won't notice the down-grading of quality. You will. At this price, I suspect you wouldn't buy this book if you were to see it at a bookstore. The compromise in cover quality is grossly conspicuous.

I think of books as investments. I'm willing to pay more for quality, and I think of it as a nice, simple heirloom for my children, from which they may learn to share some of my interests. But here, you get a cheaply manufactured product, where some concession was made which ruined the whole, wonderful concept that someone (the author,namely) probably poured years into developing. Regardless, for this price, I want a first-rate book. And, quite frankly, I don't want any cheaply made books in my personal library. Books should be--and always have been, until recently--objects of art. Cheaps bindings destroy that concept.

I'm a huge fan of Amazon, but I'm recommending to them that they have binding designations to indicate "cloth" so we can distinguish the hardbacks between quality and junk. This book begs for a cloth binding, and I'm saddened that it--and we--did not get that.

This book should have an expanded title: "...from Washington's Yakima Valley". Shoppers beware! There are no citrus fruit labels displayed within the book. It seems odd that the title would claim to be the "ultimate" without including citrus fruit, hence the need for a different title. Othwerwise, the book is a treasure of wonderful works of art beautifully displayed with lots of historic information.

John A. Baule's The Ultimate Fruit Label Book is a gorgeous representation of fruit labels from the late 1800s to the early 1960s: the heyday of millions of bright, colorful paper labels used by fruit growers to catch the eye and advertise their produce. This isn't just a value guide, though: over 1,700 color images are listed alphabetically and including stock and private labels from grows and associations alike, along with histories of major fruit companies and collecting hints. The result is a gorgeous presentation and a 'must' for any with more than a casual interest in fruit labels.

For a number of years, I worked with the Yakima Museum to create this book. Due to the nature of the publishing business and the publisher, it turned into a "pretty picture book" instead of the detailed history we had spent years discussing. Therefore, I published a companion guide called "Extra Fancy -- The label Art of the Pacific Northwest" which contains over 540 pages of information, more than 1,500 label images, maps of agricultural regions, letterheads, articles, classic postcard and advertising images, and 100,000 words of text. Chapter One covers the true agricultural history of the Northwest region including Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Idaho and other local regions, with the text accompanied by label images through the past 125 years, illustrating the story. Chapter Two goes into depth about the history of just Washington State and its roots in the apple business. Chapter Three covers more than 20 agricultural regions of Washington, with labels from even the most rare and remote areas, and gives full biographies and date charts for Skookum, Wenoka and Nuchief. Other chapters cover surrounding regions, the agricultural and packing process from tree to consumer, and illustrated biographies of nearly 50 of the most important and influential fruit shipping concerns in Washington history. This is by far the most comprehensive volume ever produced on these subjects, and the cost is the same as one moderatly rare label, just $59.95 and $4. shipping and handling. It has also been designed to work in harmony with the Yakima Museum's recent color book described below. The reason is, producing this book in full color would have cost over $100,000. and each volume would have to sell for perhaps $150. or more. Of the 1,500 images in my book, many are featured in color in the museum's companion volume. Thus, by utilizing my book and theirs, readers can have the fully intended original story AND most of the color pictures. ORIGINALLY, this is the book we were publishing, but after the publisher got ahold of it, it became two books. So, inasmuch as this is a reasonable color picture book, if you want the REAL history of the Northwest's labels and agricultural history, I suggest you get my book, as well. -- Pat Jacobsen ISBN# 0-9640703-8-3 Fruit Crate [...]

Hard to fathom why "The Ultimate Fruit Label Book" would have ZERO orange crate labels.
What is the author's rationale for this HUGE omission?
He was obviously aware of it, so how could he have okay'd such a title?
It's a wonderful APPLE LABEL book -- which makes the title all the more unfortunate
Jim