The Pareto principle states that you get 80% of the value from 20% of the effort. In this case, the book is literally 20% the size of the original and 10% the cost of the full size reproductions.
Yes, you get 80% of the value out of the book. The images cutouts are lovely and paper cutouts are perfectly suited for miniaturization since they aren’t very detailed. Furthermore, Matisse hand wrote his text in a huge script which still looked large in this compact edition. As a book, there was minimal translation in making it a smaller book.
However, art isn’t an 80-20 game.
Something doesn’t feel quite right with the book. It’s partly because the translation was located in a separate section. Even though Matisse claims that the writing was not important, flipping back and forth detracted from the experience. The publisher also reformatted this reprint to be in a landscape format there are four pages visible on each spread. Even worse, the publisher messed around with the spreads and altered the page order.
The biggest problem is that when you are so tantalizingly close to the artist’s original intentions, its impossible to shake the disappointment of not crossing the finish line. In this case the missing 20% is a big deal. Ideally, an English edition would have been printed full size with a slightly expanded page size to include a small typeset translation of the writing on each page.
Then again, we live in a world of limits. This little edition was still a good deal. The full size editions are out of print and cost a few hundred dollars on the secondary market. Jazz is great, but not at that price. I’ll just wait for the next publisher to print a fresh batch of full size copies.
I should note that my edition is now personalized. I was reading Jazz and also sketching my boy playing with his toys in the playroom. It was late at night and I fell asleep on the carpet. He stopped playing, found the pencil, opened up the closest book, and went to work.