Bulky, heavy, pricey - yet flourishing. Art catalogs keep print alive in the digital era
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As far as art books go, “Matisse in the Barnes Foundation,” published last year by Thames & Hudson, is pretty exquisite: Three hardback volumes, totaling 894 pages, that tell the story of the works that are a bedrock of the Barnes Foundation collection in Philadelphia.
The books come in a special clothbound slipcase and boast features such as tinted paper, full-bleed photographs and fold-out pages that allow the reader to see Matisse’s work in great detail — all of it elegantly composed by Pentagram, an award-winning design firm.
The award-winning book retails for $350 and checks in at a robust 17.7 pounds, requiring a specially constructed box to ship.
“It’s a fantastic piece of book-making,” says Will Balliett, president and publisher of Thames & Hudson Inc., the global company’s North American branch. “It appeals to a collector’s instincts. You experience an artist’s work in a museum, and it has an impact and it hits you and you want to take a little piece of it home if you can.”
Art catalogs are books that generally come in one of three forms: as a record of a temporary exhibition at a museum or gallery, as a printed archive of a museum’s permanent collection or as an artist monograph devoted to a single artist who may or may not be tied to a museum exhibition.
They range from small (a softback published for a gallery show with a print-run of no more than 300 copies) to coffee-table tomes featuring specialty papers and binding, and limited-edition prints with print runs of more than 5,000.
And at a time when print publishing has ceded territory to digital, the tiny, rarefied world of art catalogs remains defiantly analog.
“It’s one of the steadiest parts of our business,” Balliett said of catalogs. “Many of these books are upward of $75, and when you have a book that is unique and it gets into that range and above, it’s probably one of our safest areas.”
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