1960s Paisley Prints

This 8 5/8 inch square 204-page perfect bound softcover book (©2012, 1st printing) includes more content than earlier titles, but the price is a bit higher, also. The book begins with image rights information, in nine languages, followed by 193 paisley print fabric samples printed in color, one per page (mostly), on heavy paper. There is no editorial content. A CD with the images is affixed inside the back cover in a plastic envelope.The designs range from two colors to multiple colors. Flipping through the book, my first reaction was that the patterns were not as colorful as expected. Fortunately, on screen, the images appear somewhat more colorful, but paisley designs with more intense color certainly exist. The lack of more vivid colors is because the designs are all fabric samples, not graphic art. The digital images are not cropped as are the printed images and include ragged edges with string tendrils. Many digital images are not closely cropped from the original photograph and include much white space (table top) around the fabric sample. The pixel size of these images is not indicative of the useful image size. With no editorial content, the provenance of the designs is unknown. Because the designs are complex and show the texture of the fabric, they are largely useful for inspiration, not direct usage. For all these attributes the images are not particularly useful for my purposes and therefor good for only two stars.There are 197 pages of printed paisley samples but 192 images on the CD; four images are printed across two pages and one printed image is not on the disk. Each image file on the CD is named with the page number in the book, but only some pages actually have page numbers. The images in the book are square and cropped from the CD images, which are of varying rectangular proportions. Images on the CD are JPG in both the CMYK and RGB color spaces. The CMYK images are larger, with the majority having a long dimension in the 2,500 to 2,900 pixel range. The RGB images are all 791 pixels in the height dimension, which is most often the shortest one. The disk space used by the CMYK images is 309MB while the RGB images require only 43.9MB; the RGB images are, on average, 14% the size of the CMYK images.The Pepin Press image rights are considerably relaxed from the restrictive terms in earlier volumes. It’s now allowable for the owner of the book to use images for “all private, non-professional and non-commercial endeavours (sic)” without an image number restriction specified. Also allowed is usage in “web (sic) design using 10 or fewer images per project and/or small-scale commercial use (for example: brochures with a print run of fewer than 5000 copies in which no more than 5 of our images are used).” Also noted is that “Larger and/or vector files are available for most images and can be ordered….”The plastic CD envelopes in Pepin Press books exude an oily substance onto the CD. In one case in my experience it made the disc unreadable. I routinely clean Pepin CD’s with a microfiber cloth before attempting to read and line the book’s envelope with protective woven paper.

If you love paisley, this is an awesome resource

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