I have complained several times here at RCN about the lack of basic publication and other information about the covers, spot illustrations, and other materials featured in the books that have been published to date about the work of Jeffrey Jones.

Today, however, I am delighted to highlight a book that promises to fill in some of the blanks in our knowledge of Jones’s career and perhaps bring to light a few forgotten gems in Jones’s vast back-catalogue of published work:

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Here’s the publisher’s description:

Vanguard follows Frazetta: The Definitive Reference with Jeffrey Jones: The Definitive Reference. Frazetta called Hugo and World Fantasy Award winner, Jones, the greatest living painter. This book catalogues all published Jones work: book covers, National Lampoon, Idyl, comics, The Studio (with Wrightson, Winsdor-Smith and Kaluta), prints, portfolios, and more.

The regular hardcover edition runs 176 pages, the deluxe slip-cased edition is 192 pages and features a 16 page bonus folio section not part of the regular hardcover edition.

With a career as poorly documented as Jones’s has been, the task of compiling a catalogue of all of the artist’s published work must have involved countless hours of scholarly detective work. That being said, however, one doesn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that an online errata sheet will be posted by someone or other shortly after the book is published. Because the fact is, generally speaking, very few scholarly reference works make it to press without some errors and/or omissions, and even fewer do so when the area of research is an obscure corner of popular culture. But don’t pass up the first edition of Jeffrey Jones: The Definitive Reference in hope that an updated/corrected/perfect edition will appear at some future date. If the first edition is not successful in the first place, an updated/corrected edition won’t even be a possibility.

P.S. Needless to say, Jones fan that I am, I have already pre-ordered the slip-cased edition.