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If you've been a figurative artist for any length of time, you've probably at least heard about the Pose File series of books by Elte Shuppan / Books Nippan that were published in the early 1990s and have been out of print for about a decade (not to be confused with the American books of the same name currently being published). These books seem to be very sought-after in the used-book market. They retailed for $49.99 back in the nineties, but in good condition, used copies go from about $75 up to $500 or even more depending on which volume (generally later volumes go for more) and condition; even the more common volumes are somewhat hard to find.

I've been curious about these books for some time. If you read this blog, you're probably aware of the fact that I'm a reference junkie, but by the time I got seriously into sculpting, these books had already been out of print for several years, and I really didn't know if they were worth what you had to pay for them, since I had never been able to look at one in person. Well, periodically, I troll eBay and used book sites looking for things that interest me, and these books are among the things I keep an eye out for, hoping to find them at a price I'm willing to pay. In the course of several years, it had never happened.

So, imagine my surprise one day when a search, sorted by price, showed a list of available copies of Pose File books with the first item listed for $7! The second item in the list was the same book, but was going for $78, and the rest of the items in the search went up from there. The $7 book was "Pose File 1: Everyday Perspective", the most common volume, but even at that, it typically goes for $75 or so. Needless to say, I was definitely willing to pay $10 or so (including shipping) to check it out, since I was pretty sure I could make my money back on eBay even if the book was lousy. I'm cheap, and was in no hurry, so I had them use media mail, which brought my total investment to just over $10. That was a little over a week ago, and it finally arrived today:

Other than a little fading and wear on the dust jacket, the book is in just about perfect condition. It's a good quality book, with a good binding (it is softcover, even though there's a dustjacket). The book uses very good quality paper and the printing appears to be of similarly high quality. Although, I can't find my linen tester to check the line screen, it looks darn good to my naked eye.

These books are clearly targeted at illustrators, and probably more specifically at comic book artists. That's not surprising, since comic books are considered a more serious medium in the Land of the Rising Sun (日本) than they are here with genres targeting all age groups. As a result, aspiring comic book artists are a substantial niche audience there. Regardless, it's certainly not a bad book to have on your bookshelf as a sculptor. Most of the poses are taken from multiple angles, and the lighting and photography are done so that shape and form are relatively easy to discern. The images are all black and white, which is actually a benefit for sculptors since it's easier to judge form from shades of grey than from different hues, and overall, this book is worth well more than the ten bucks I spent.

Would it have been worth the retail price of $49.99 or the more commonly found used prices? That's a tougher call. If I were an illustrator or comic book artist, I think I'd find that $49.99 was a fair price for the quality of the product, but the price you find on some of the rarer volumes would still be off-putting for me, but that may just be because I'm cheap. As a sculptor, I'm even less sure that they're valuable enough to justify the higher amount, at least based on what I can judge from the volume I bought. You, see, there are a few drawbacks about this book as a sculpting reference. I do not know if these problems are unique to this particular volume or exist in all of them, but here are the things about this book that make it less than ideal as a figure reference for me personally, to wit:

• The images are too darn small. Yes, I know that printing is expensive and that the publisher had to balance quantity and quality within a limited number of pages, but I think they erred and went too small, even though the quality of printing is excellent and you can use a magnifier, which helps some.
• There's not much variety. Yes, it's from Japan, so I expected the models to all be Japanese, but even by that standard, there's not much diversity. The few models featured in the book are all female, and they all fall within a very narrow range of body types.
• Blurring - ugh! I understand that there are business (and in some places legal) reasons to blur out the genitals, but it still annoys me. In all fairness, this book actually does a pretty good job with the blurring (especially compared with the horrific blurring done in the Virtual Pose series of books) - in most cases, they blur only the bare minimal amount of the image, but it's not perfect and it does bug me when I see it because it reminds me just how provincial an attitude so many people have toward nudity - even nudity that serves a valid, necessary, and long-recognized function

I'd also like to see at least one larger orthographic shot of each model used for measuring proportion and making scale references with. Now, I'm being really nit-picky with these complaints, and I don't want to end this quasi-review on a negative note. This is a good book by almost every measure, especially for the audience for which it was originally created. The quality of the printing and binding and photography are all excellent, it's just not a book made specifically and primarily for sculptors, which isn't really fair to hold against it.

Let's be frank here: There are no figure references books anywhere in or out of print hat would make me completely happy. We sculptors are just too small of an audience for a publisher to bother making something to meet our specific needs, and publishers know that we will spend our money on less-than-perfect figure reference works developed with the needs of illustrators or comic book artists in mind and be moderately happy with them. Oh, well.