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       In terms of creating a new and different WW II history book, there had to be a novel facet to all this.

       Why?  Because WW II history had been around since 1945. 

       One early publication, for example, was a book printed right after the war called “U.S. Navy War Photographs” which when first released on the market, sold at a rate of a million copies a month, at 35 cents each.  Almost all of the photography had originally been taken in color by brave cameramen of the era.  Some names to remember who were in the forefront of the Second World War era were Bob Capa, Johnny Florea, John Ford, Captain Louis Hayward, Sergeant Louis R. Lowery, Luis Marden, Joe Rosenthal, Don Senick, Sergeant Robert T. Sand, Wayne Miller, Fenno Jacobs, Barrett Gallagher, Paul Dorsey, and the venerable Edward Steichen.  From the archives of Time-Life, we have Eliot Elisofon, Dimitri Kessel, Hugo Jaegar, and William Vandivert. 

       In further retrospect, it was sometime in the late 1970s, when I was still in school, that the publishing world was hit with the first WW II history books containing rare color, but, unfortunately most were not American.  Literally, I mean it. Published in that decade were the picture books originally printed in color and black and white in Nazi Germany from a magazine titled Signal which were released to the general public.  To a young man growing up who loved history, they were very interesting and fascinating.  The Signal editions seemed unique in that they possessed color photographs no other limited books had and were published in 25 languages with the final editions printed until the very end of the war.  Overall, they were propaganda of how great the Third Reich was, and in the beginning of the war they did seem unstoppable.  At the height of printing, 2,500,000 copies of each issue were published. 

      Throughout the years, followed various editions of Signal.  The British publishing industry shared their knowledge via the Imperial War Museum collections.  The 1970s and 1980s were a wonderful time for color photography of the WW II era.  Little did I know at that time, but America of the 1940s had also been shot in color.  I knew they existed, but thought in terms of limited production, as in the genre of Hollywood movies in color during the 1930s and early 1940s.  Upon further research, I learned that was not the case.

     To enter that market, had to involve some novel, catchy facet, and in the vibrancy of color, because the WW II history book genre was saturated with b-w.   Yet, when I first approached the big publishing houses to see if they would publish my books, they were either not interested in a newcomer or said sure but because the printing in color was still expensive, they wanted to center my project on b-w.  I said no way, the market is saturated with all that, and I don’t stand a chance to be recognized.

     So, I put on hold trying to publish my history of WW II, but that actually turned up to be fortunate, because the era of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the era when book publishing began to leave the old-fashion way of producing a book: in came the entrance of digital publishing and novel ways of proofing your manuscripts.  It was wild and wonderful, and the author was in the forefront of all this. 

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      It was during this time that came the publication series of Time-Life sets on the Second World War, however they were mainly in b-w.  The narratives were excellent with masterful indexes. The picture books were big, 11.5 x 9.5.  The color photographs found in the volume Prelude To War (complete with the decadence of Berlin) for example had several color photos of night scenes of the Nazis never before seen by the general public.  That was novel then. 

       By the mid-1990s, we saw the publication of other books concentrating on the beauty of color photography, unlike the aforementioned Time-Life.  Examples that clearly led the list were the aviation books on WW II by authors Jeff L. Ethell and Roger A. Freeman.  I believe Ethell’s first two volumes were The History of Aircraft Nose Art,  191 pages, 1991 which was mainly on the art work that dotted WW II aircraft, and Fighter Command, 160 pages, 1991. In Fighter Command, WW II veteran Bob Sand added grace of history as numerous photos in the book are from his collection of pics he took while serving in England.  There Once Was a War, 1995 is one of my favorites for it shows the overall worldwide pictures in color, although some pics in the collection field are static.  Another favorite of mine is Flying the Hump, by Jeff Ethell and Don Downie, 1995, about the World War II Americans who flew over the Himalayan Mountains to aid China; over 1,300 Americans lost their lives.  Prime examples of Ethell's books can be found here at this link.  He had flown more than 150 different types of aircraft.  The books cited used the old-fashioned way of printing and were rather expensive.  They are primarily wonderful picture books. 

 

       The dynamic of color photography is shown in two streamliner train books, The American Streamliner Prewar Years, 176 pages, 1996, and The American Streamliner Postwar Years, 2001, 200 pages, both by the eminent team of Donald J. Hamburger and Carl R. Byron.  One of my other favorites in color and b-w is The American Passenger Train by Mike Schaffer, Joe Welsh, and Kevin Holland, which even takes you to Amtrak, complete with color postcards and train folders, 2001, 156 pages.  Since that era, everything today is published mainly in color, and usually via the digital way, from art books, cook books and every realm of industry, to passenger jets and ships.  But, the power of the printed press was shrinking and continues to shrink.

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