Book Review: Bowl-O-Rama: The Visual Arts of Bowling

Strike!

This one of those delightful books from the Abbeville Press `Recollectibles' series. As far as I'm aware they only published sixteen titles in the eighties, all with the same visual style editorial pages and neat square shape. Abbeville editor Walton Rawls was responsible for these interesting books.

Bowl-o-rama kicks off with a clever cover idea: three holes are punched through the thick cardboard in proportion to the photo of the bowling ball (the Recollectible covers tried to go for something unusual, the book on miniature golf used some AstroTurf on the cover). The ninety-six pages are full of photos and printed ephemera about the subject and each of the ten chapters starts with a few words of text, the only other words are captions to the images. The few hundred pictures are nicely laid out though if the book was published today I expect a drop shadow would be used for the images.

Bowling fans will obviously enjoy the look back over the last few decades and graphic artists would also find the Americana feel interesting.

Bowl-O-Rama: The Visual Arts of Bowling (Recollectibles) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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