There have been books with blueprints in them, mostly drawn by those who wanted to extend the creativity of the Star Wars universe, but now Lucas is releasing through Epic Books a monumental collection of the real blueprints from their archives in a cloth bound limited edition box set.
The book is actually huge in scope and in size. It weighs 35 pounds and is 15” x 18” and 336 pages. The width and height were necessary, according to editor Kristin Mehus-Roe, in order to better show the details that are in each blueprint. Of course, for the price, the large size will also be very impressive to your friends. For those pages that were still too small, there are even gateway pages that fold out, 10 in all.
What is amazing about this is the thoughts and creativity that went into these blueprints, stuff that wasn’t even necessary for the film, such as the nucleonic catalyst tank. No one knows what it does these days and why it was there, but it was. And so it’s interesting to see what the designers had in mind when planning these movie sets out. It seems as though they went far beyond just what was required, creating not just ships and sets, but a whole believable world.
But the volume isn’t just about highly detailed blueprints, but photos, concept drawings and more. Each ship is covered on a few pages, whatever was necessary to portray the full details. For instance, there is a photo of Darth Vader in his TIE fighter to show how he would have sat in it. It also includes photos of the art direction, set designers and special effects team.
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The video goes into far more than we can cover here, showing various pages of the collection and how it came to be.
Written by J.W. Rinzler, who is the author of a lot of the behind the scenes Star Wars books, he hopes to finally show the fans what they have always wondered about. But if you want one of these bad boys, the price is $1000 for the first 125 books (most of which are probably gone already) and $500 for 126-5000. The price difference is because the first 125 are signed by Academy Award winning art and set directors from Star Wars, adding to the value. The other 4875 are not signed, and thus the discount. You may find these cheaper than at Epic Books who charges the retail rate of these, but be careful as you want to make sure that they are indeed authentic. A certificate is included with each real copy. The publisher says that it will send out the lowest numbered volume available.
These are out now so act fast…
