Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures

The first full account of Reynold Brown, whose paintings for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are among the most reproduced American images of the 1950s and are almost never credited to him.

Daniel Zimmer and David J. Hornung assembled the book from original paintings, drawings, photographs, and printed ephemera, running 224 pages at 12.25 by 9.75 inches with more than 500 colour illustrations, many reproduced full page. It follows Brown's whole working life rather than the poster years alone: the Tailspin Tommy newspaper strip he drew as a teenager, the cutaway technical drawings he developed for North American Aviation during the war, early paperback covers and magazine illustration, and then the roughly 300 film posters. A first printing of 1,000 copies was issued, with a deluxe edition of 100 signed by the artist's widow and both authors; an expanded version followed from the same press in 2017.

Reynold Brown (1917–1991) worked almost entirely to commission and to deadline, and studios rarely put his name on the results. He taught at Art Center in Los Angeles late in life, and a stroke in 1976 ended his painting career.