Why Must Read Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie?

As a boy I had McQuarrie's art from the STAR WARS portfolio covering the walls of my room. I bought all the poster books that had his art. I read everything I could about him in STARLOG. All these years I dreamed that someone would create a definitive release of his work. Today a huge box arrived and now I can't stop smiling. I appreciated that the set was double boxed. No dings. It's huge and heavy, on par with STAR WARS FRAMES. Maybe heavier. My only complaint is that some of my favorite paintings are reproduced as a 2-page spread and they suffer because of the gutter distorting the image. The upside is the detail visible. The binding is nicely sewn so the book opens mostly flat. And I am delighted by how much TEXT there is to read. This is a set of books I will enjoy and come back to again and again for the rest of my life. I haven't been as excited about a Star Wars book since Rinzler's THE MAKING OF STAR WARS. Truth be told, this set may be only second to that series. Why specifically? McQuarrie rarely kept his early renderings. When Lucas wanted a change, McQuarrie just painted over whatever Lucas wanted fixed. Because copies of the paintings were made immediately for distribution to the designers of the movie, each version of his paintings was unintentionally saved from the dust bin of history. Not only does this set include the studies for his paintings, but EVERY version of each painting (with commentary). It's more than I could have ever hoped for. The printing and color are first rate. The only painting that could possibly be missing as far as I can tell is the night time establishing shot of Chewbacca's house in the STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL, but it's unclear if McQuarrie created that painting. The rest of his paintings, studies, sketches, Christmas cards, doodles, pop-up books, posters, storyboards and even drawings fans rescued from Lucasfilm's trash bins are here. Really too wonderful for words. I thought of how STAR WARS changed the way movies were made and seen, how it opened the door for everything that followed from Lucas, how it inspired the lives of so many artists, including my own. Then I realized that without these drawings, none of that would have happened the way it happened, because some of the art in these volumes helped convince the studio to proceed with pre-production on STAR WARS when they may have been considering pulling the plug because they had no idea, visually, what it was about. In my opinion this is among the most important Star Wars books ever released.