I am pleased to report that the Third Exhibition of American
Decorated Publishers' Bindings will have a new home. It is being
acquired in its entirety by the Boston Athenæum.
All the
original books in Volume 3 of the catalog of American
Decorated Publishers' Bindings, 1872-1929 will be available for your
research once they have been entered into the Athenæum's
system. I will post an announcement at that time.
Copies of the limited edition and CD-ROM edition of the catalog are
still available. A few complete sets of the three volumes of the
limited edition with matching numbers are available as well, if you
missed the first two.
More than just beautiful catalogs for curators and collectors, these
volumes provide insights for graphic designers, art historians, and
students of material culture.
Together, the three volumes include 1,100 cover designs with 141
identified artists. The text illuminates the evolution of book
covers in the modern era, when artists brought new visual paradigms
into the American home. In the context of their time, some of these
covers were revolutionary harbingers of art movements that occurred
decades after the covers were produced.
For nearly a century these were ignored by art and design
historians. They were so pervasive that people stopped seeing them
as art. Now that e-book readers have replaced books with homogenized
texts, they appear as artifacts of a lost culture.
Institutional libraries often have hundreds of these books, still in
circulating stacks. One use that librarians are making of the data
file on the CD-ROM that comes with the limited edition (also
available independently) is to run a comparison with the
institution's catalog for an automated search of these books in
their collections. They then can be removed from circulation to
preserve them, and can be the basis for an exhibition that will be
of interest to Friends of the Library and the outreach community.
Best regards,
Richard
Volume 3 Limited Edition
Volume 2 Limited Edition
Volume 1 Limited Edition