The arbitrary decision to disallow announcements of new
book postings, especially by creative and scholarly members of the ARLIS art
community, and new catalogues by bookseller members is simply going to
far. Of course no one wants to be deluged with blatant commercial appeals,
but such announcements, without the mention of prices, are not the same
thing.
Authors’ and booksellers’ announcements, which are
basically low key, simply should not be conflated with commercial
advertising.
I challenge the committee to share the text of an
author’s, artist’s, or bookseller’s announcement with a tax lawyer or an IRS
agent for a more rational opinion regarding these modest postings. How
they can in any way threaten the Society’s non-profit status is beyond me.
Why are we in ARLIS anyway? Despite the ever-growing
digitalization of the literature of art, didn’t the original formation of the
Society have something to do with art books, their collection, their
dissemination, and their availability to an audience of scholars, collectors and
art enthusiasts?
Personally, nothing sounded more commercial to me than
the recent announcement regarding the development of an ARLIS Marketplace, with
such postings categorized as “E-Blasts”, a term which I find overly trendy and
frankly offensive when referring to catalogues by myself and those of my
esteemed colleagues, which if anything, are as scholarly and non-commercial as
many of the books which come up for review. It’s not likely that any of us
bookseller members will be paying for such “Blasts”, given their basically
commercial thrust and cost.
As an aside, I am grateful to the President for granting me a
one-time complimentary “E-Blast” to announce the availability of two massive
catalogues on architecture and on modern design – my first since 2001, both in
the works for more than a decade.
The permission, however, came about a month after I
submitted my announcement, not expecting it to be rejected. As result, I
had to send it in advance piecemeal to a handful of selected members (who
responded strongly with substantial orders). For it to be current,
however, I had to revise the catalogues and delete the items already sold,
requiring a good deal of additional time and labor, while denying the membership
at large opportunities for serious collection development. If the E-Blast
was to attract responses, it did not work, so I am not sure how widely it was
disseminated. I received no more than a half dozen or so requests for the
catalogues, despite the nearly fifteen years of research and collecting that
went into their contents. The paucity of the response was almost as
shocking as the announcement’s original rejection.
And as my own book of photographs, In Time We Shall Know
Ourselves, with essays by Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University) and Richard H.
King (University of Nottingham) - a book in the works for forty years, which I
hoped to announce to my ARLIS friends - soon becomes available (in conjunction
with the traveling exhibition organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
opening in June), I hope its realization will not be deemed too commercial for
our very special readership.
Respectfully,
Raymond Smith
R.W. Smith Bookseller
New Haven
[A loyal ARLIS member since 1980]