WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — "Universal Studio Monsters" (Universe) arrives just in time for Halloween. It's a luxurious coffee-table book about the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and a few other classic monsters that were devised or most famously brought to fruition by Universal.
The book is organized by monster, with various sidebars focusing on the actors and technicians, such as makeup artist Jack Pierce, who devised the makeups that defined the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's monster.
The copy, by Michael Mallory, is all right, basically extended captions, but a book like this rises or falls on its stills, and this one rises. Many of them are rare, and all of them are beautifully reproduced. If you grew up with Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, this one's for you.
In the Pipeline...
Willie Geist, who co-hosts MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, is co-writing a book called "Loaded" with Boyd McDonnell. It's a parody of get-rich-quick books about a pair of mythical financial wizards named Bill Richter and Bill Lacey — "The Dollar Bills" — who offer atrocious advice on how to make money. St. Martin's will publish ... Viking will publish a new biography of Napoleon in 2014 by historian Andrew Roberts that supposedly will revolve around a cache of letters no historian has ever had access to. In case you're wondering, October 2014, the scheduled publication date, is just a few months before the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.
Mike Browning's Word of the Week...
famelic: starving; hungry.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.