The Wonderful World of Bill Ward, King of the Glamour Girls Hardcover – June 1, 2006

If you're a fan of Bill Ward, you'll want this beautifully produced, extremely complete luxury edition containing a staggering volume of the artist's best work. If you're not familiar with this artist, among America's greatest pin-up masters, this book will make a believer out of you. Truly beautiful and fun and superbly packaged.

True Art! Bill truly worships the female form and draws gorgeous goddesses.

wow! bigger book than I expected. thank you

WOW!A HUGE volume, filled with great Bill Ward art. Reproduced in rather large format, there is plenty in this hefty volume.First class material, in a "large economy" size volume.Buy it if you can!

A very nice collection of Bill Ward. A huge book released by Taschen. If you can find it cheap and you know what it is, I would recommend getting it.

If you're a fan of Good Girl art, you know that there were few better, in his heyday, than the late, great Bill Ward. The creator of _Torchy_ had no qualms about being a girlie artist, and got even more graphic later in life. But regardless of what period of his career you look at, he never lost his taste for women with huge breasts, tiny waists, and high heels - a feminine ideal, to be sure.WONDERFUL WORLD OF BILL WARD is a great sampling of a lot of his work. I say "sampling" to save you from making the same mistake I did, of thinking that a volume this big was a comprehensive anthology of all of Bill Ward's artwork. Notably absent are his really adult work leading up to his death, and only a sampling of his _Scorchy_ strips. And the book is as big and thick as it is because it just repeats its content in multiple languages, over and over again. Nonetheless, its real draw is that it contains a comprehensive and fascinating biography of Ward, and some of his better illustrations over the course of his long career. You see the evolution of _Torchy_, many of his famous "phone girl" drawings, and some adult stuff, though hardly all. Perhaps a comprehensive collection of Ward's work is impossible, meaning this volume is as good as you're going to get. I like having it as a handy reference to the man, and chance to see some of who he was in action, and for a fan of large breasts, slim waists, and high heels, that ain't such a bad thing after all.

very happy

It's unfortunate that Bill Ward's most well known pin-up work appeared in down-market, scruffy, digest-sized magazines because it meant that he was not considered with the big names like Varga, Petty or Elvgren and many others who created 'painted ladies'. This huge book (check out the dimensions, above especially the thickness: two inches) will most likely become the standard reference to his work though.The book divides his career into three sections; the early years show work for various comic book publishers and his Torchy title where you can clearly see the origins of his later glamour style. The second section has 180 of his Conte crayon cartoons for Abe Goodman's various Humorama digest-size titles and this is the art that Ward is famous for.Between 1947 and 1967 he claims to have drawn more than seven thousand of these sexy females and despite the large number they are each worth serious money to collectors. These drawings are one, two or four to a page and printed in sepia with white highlights. Another book of his work 'The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward' (ISBN 1560975318) has about 116 Conte drawings all one to a page and nicely doesn't seem to have any pictures duplicated with this Kroll book. If you can take your eyes of the dames you'll notice how Ward used embossed wallpaper samples to create curtains, cushions and sometimes filmy negligees by putting the sample under his drawing paper and rubbing the Conte crayon across the relevant area.The third section of the book covers work after Humorama and here I think his style lacks the creativity of the Conte work. There are plenty of examples of paperback covers, color cartoons, comics, covers to porno magazines and a real surprise, the 1954 Lili St. Cyr lingerie catalog where Ward created precise model drawings with Lili's face on each.At the front of the book Eric Kroll writes a fascinating fifty-page introduction with many quotes from the artist and illustrated with plenty of artwork and photos, in this beautifully designed and printed book devoted to the glamour work of Bill Ward.