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Perspectives

Art books and book history


valerie holman

I dictated the whole text using illustrations market existed for books on art, and that to market forces but as cultural artefacts,
found in books I owned. With the help of
these illustrations, I simply told the story from
even with a low profit margin, if an art enshrining ideas, they may also be adversely
memory . . . I took what I had written for book was good enough and cheap enough affected by political pressures, censorship,
[an]other book, and made it the introduction and produced in sufficient quantities, it legal constraints, or religious interdicts on
for this one . . . I remember the chapter on the would prove financially successful. Pub- content and imagery. Even a cursory exami-
12th century ended a page short.1
lication of The Story of Art coincided with the nation of publishers' archives reveals the

T
unprecedented public demand for culture, extent to which the publication of books
o meet the lay-out requirement that
images and art books that characterised has always been subject to external factors,
every chapter should start on a right-
the immediate post-war period, and it has and has never depended simply on the merit
hand page, the designer supplied a
subsequently become one of the steadiest of the subject or the text.
further photograph from his personal
best-sellers in British art publishing Books are the end-product of a long and
collection and the author added a brief
history, with sales of over six million. complex process sometimes lasting many
accompanying text at the last minute. This
As an object of historical enquiry `the years, and each associated activity ±
wartime commission, a book synthesised
book' is already the focus of many different printing, publishing, distribution and sale
from several different sources and under-
research strategies. Book historians study ± takes place over time and is in turn
taken with great reluctance, was eventually
the practices and representations of reading permeable to events in the wider world,
published as The Story of Art in December
in order to understand how individuals and especially now that publishing is essentially
1949. In recent editions it has sometimes
communities of readers have appropriated international at every stage. Their success is
been reviewed as a `text book', a term
and made meaning out of specific texts; also related to trends in social behaviour
repudiated by Gombrich himself and
they trace the circuits of knowledge created and taste which may affect how long and in
more suggestive of market needs than of
by distribution of printed material, whether what form they remain in print. They are
the author's intention. Gombrich's mem-
books, periodicals or pamphlets; they consumed by culturally-determined prac-
oirs provide a useful corrective to the
explore the lives and careers of printers, tices of reading and looking, to each of
commonly-held view that book and text
publishers, booksellers and librarians, and which an individual brings his or her own
are virtually synonymous and that a
the influence of individual designers, typo- expectations, reading of other books, and
relatively seamless continuity exists be-
graphers and illustrators. Because books imaginary museum of remembered images.
tween original manuscript, its publication
are manufactured, they require raw The history of the book, then, can be
in book form, and the way in which the
materials, machinery and manpower, all studied as product, process and practice.
book is read.
of which, in times of political turmoil or In addition to a generic history of the
The moment at which a reader first
economic depression, may be scarce and book, each individual title has its own
encounters an author's ideas in published
costly. As commodities they are vulnerable history, for publication of every book in-
form may be many years after the text was
first written, and there is often a real
disjunction not only between writing and
reception, but between the time and
circumstances of textual creation and book
publication. The Story of Art, for example,
was initially offered to the publisher
Geoffrey Faber who, in the 1930s, was
keen to locate his firm in the forefront of
the Modern Movement. One reader's
report was enthusiastic, the other ±
submitted in August 1939 ± was not, and
The Story of Art was rejected. When it was
finally published ten years later by Phaidon
in a different political and cultural climate
for a more precisely defined readership ±
teenagers ± it neither looked nor read like a
Faber book, and was priced and sold
according to a wholly different premise:
that a much wider and so far untapped
SHIPLEY SPECIALIST ART BOOKSELLERS
1
E H Gombrich, A Lifelong Interest. Conversations 70 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0BB
on Art and Science with Didier Erebon, London, Thames Tel: 020 7836 4872; Fax: 020 7379 4358; www.artbook.co.uk
and Hudson, 1993, pp. 64±65.

32 The Art Book volume 9 issue 2 march 2002 ß bpl/aah


Perspectives

volves a series of encounters entailing at modernist art history focused on the latest history: in West Africa, for example, it has
least some element of negotiation or avant-garde. In the twentieth century, for been shown that `authentic' objects are
compromise over the original manuscript example, it became conventional to identify defined by many traders simply as those
and the form in which it eventually appears one of the most important changes in art that have been illustrated in art books.
in print. The publisher may have a par- publishing as the widespread introduction Perhaps most interestingly, one of the
ticular cultural or political agenda, a list of colour illustration after the Second questions that book historians are cur-
into which new titles must comfortably fit; World War. The prominence of art books rently exploring in a number of periods and
he or she may have a particular approach to and their high visibility in national cultural types of publication is not what people
communicating with the public that deter- life, however, suggests that they should be read, but how. What, for example, distin-
mines the design or marketing of the book. studied in more adventurous ways than as guished the nineteenth-century woman
A series editor not only selects authors indicators of artistic and critical trends, a reader? Was, and is, the activity of reading
whose work sustains a particular image of means of accumulating cultural capital, or different among different classes or
the publishing house or represents his own simply as the the products of enlightened regions? How do readers now engage with
choice, but has to ensure that each volume entrepreneurial publishers. the blend of text and image that charac-
reflects the identity of the whole. While there is a substantial biblio- terises the contemporary art book? To what
Exactly ten years ago a special issue of graphy on the relationship of new techno- extent is the way we read books affected by
The Art Libraries Journal surveyed the art book logy to the reproduction of art, including material presented in other forms, such as
both comparatively across countries, and issues such as the role of photography in related television programmes? This is
historically from its origins as a distinct understanding sculpture, and the emerg- perhaps one of the most challenging areas
genre of publishing in the nineteenth cen- ence of new audiences for art with the for art book historians to investigate, but it
tury. Attributing the proliferation of art advent of print culture, very little has been is also potentially the most productive.
books after 1850, and particularly after written on how the book itself, within the In the 1990s, when book history became
1875, primarily to the growth of public context of publishing history, has affected established in the UK and the United States
interest in art and developments in printing the way we learn about and understand art, as an independent academic discipline with
technology, more significantly an attempt architecture and design. its own university courses and refereed
was made to identify the effects of this The role of art books also needs to be journals,3 a number of multi-volume,
quantitative increase. It was argued that in acknowledged in assessing the cultural national histories of the book were
the late nineteenth century, access to far impact of art and artists, and to do so published throughout the world. So far,
more art in reproduction facilitated a trend effectively implies studying in addition only in the publishing histories of three
towards eclecticism and historicism among those books that were not published, or countries, Germany, Australia and France,
practising artists, while the reading public, that had to be published either in another do art books constitute a separate category
situating art within the parameters of bio- country or at a much later date. and merit a chapter to themselves. As the
graphy and history, devoured artists' lives, Publishers' archives not only offer an volume of the History of the Book in Britain
in the short-term reinforcing the Romantic insight into the genesis of art books, but which will cover the twentieth century is as
cult of the individual artist, and in the long- they also reveal the significance of personal yet only at the planning stage, there is still
term paving the way for the centrality of the interventions made by such key figures as time to consider in depth the role of art
monograph in art literature. For example, the publisher's reader. Some of the most books in recent cultural life, and in our
`more significant works came out on celebrated art critics of the nineteenth and national publishing history.
Michelangelo between 1850 and 1900 than twentieth centuries have supplemented While The Art Book has already become a
in all the previous 300 years.'2 their, often meagre, incomes with addi- valuable forum not only for features and
On the rare occasions when book tional work as publishers' readers for as reviews, but for articles on artists' books
historians have looked at art books, they many as four different well-known art and exhibition catalogues, it also has the
too have tended to adopt a monographic publishing firms. A negative report from potential to situate contemporary books
approach, tracing individual art publishing a reader can end the life of a book, radically on art within the history of the genre, and
careers, providing company histories of change its shape and message, or mean to explore the history of individual books
major publishing houses, or exploring the that it is eventually published by another on art. Prized and acquired above all for
development of a series. Where individual firm in entirely different circumstances. the results of new research enshrined in
firms have been studied, the result is Archives also reveal that the often high the text, and the quality of their repro-
invariably a hagiography of a shrewd but cost of illustrations, whether engravings ductions, art books represent the culmina-
cultivated pioneer. In effect, the history of in the past, or more recently photographs tion of what may have been a very long
art publishing as a genre has lagged behind and reproduction fees, has a long history process, an invisible history whose impact
art history itself. At least until 1992, it either of proving a shock to art historians, and on the study of art and its reception may be
took the form of an evolutionary approach has been a source of conflict between quite as significant as the text itself.
to the effects of technological innovation, author and publisher from writers on art
or an `event-based' history that singled out such as Anna Jameson in the nineteenth Valerie Holman, University of Westminster
particular moments of change much as century to Bernard Berenson and R H
Wilenski in the twentieth. That illustra- 3
Notably the annual Book History from
tions in art books have a sometimes Pennsylvania State Press which to date has included
2
Trevor Fawcett, `The nineteenth-century art one article on books about art, Julie Codell's
book content, style and context', Art Libraries Journal, paradoxical history is an issue that extends `Serialized artists' biographies: A culture industry
Vol. 17, no. 3, 1992, p. 15. well beyond the boundaries of western art in late Victorian Britain', vol. 3, 2000, pp. 94±124.

volume 9 issue 2 March 2002 ß bpl/aah The Art Book 33

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