EMERGENCY VEHICLES

An international gallery of air, sea, and land firefighting and rescue vehicles, with hinged flaps offering peeks inside each.

Drawn with Biesty’s trademark attention to fine detail and printed on stiff cardboard, the eight featured vehicles include an Australian police car festooned with cameras and other high-tech gear, a NATO submarine rescue pod, a big New York City fireboat, and a British Tamar-class motorized lifeboat. Explanatory labels and small views of the vehicle in action or of other makes with similar jobs surround the large central image. Though the artist apparently can’t resist adding an occasional cutaway view, the flaps are designed to be almost invisible at first glance so that viewers can get a sense of what each vehicle actually looks like before they start delving into insides and distinctive gear. The labeling is sometimes perfunctory—the contents of a helicopter ambulance’s baggage compartment are generically dubbed “Emergency equipment,” and a ground-based ambulance features “privacy windows,” whatever that means—but overall the text adds informative notes about specialized features, life-saving capabilities, power plants, top speeds, and other performance data.

A pleaser for fans of big rigs and disaster scenarios alike.