A unique and interesting collection of color photos depicting a variety of warbird nose art1. The book features over 1,000 wartime photos that show artwork close up, with explanations of art, aircraft, and pilots [...]

Over 1000 photographs (118 in colour) of pin-up paintings on US military aircraft in World War II and Korea’.It’s mid-winter 1943 and you’re twenty years old. Prior to Pearl Harbor, your main goal in life was to marry Ginger Rogers, but now it’s just to stay alive because you’re a crewman on a B-17 and where you’re going, people die.

 

But not you, not your plane, because you’respecial in a special plane with a name like American Beauty or Kansas Cyclone or Enola Gay… Vintage Aircraft Nose Art is a record of the unique American art inspired by the air combat of World War II and the Korean War, an art borne of pin-up posters and the Vargas girls, Mickey Mouse and Yank cartoons, homesickness and longed-for girlfriends.

An art borne of fun and of fear. —-Packed with more than 1,000 photographs many of them contemporary with their times this book has been several years in the making.

 

Vintage Aircraft Nose Art is the comprehensive catalogue of this peerless art, and is dedicated to the crews whose humour and imagination decorated their planes.

This book will appeal to all, from air buffs to pop artists, historians to the reminiscent.

The front cover illustration was created by Stan Stokes especially for this book. He based it on Alberto Vargas ‘Sack Time’ illustration, the original of which is included in this book.