What is the highest use of a nineteenth century coffee table book filled with steel plate engravings, woodcuts and other illustrations of famed art works?
The books themselves are nice objects in decent shape given their one hundred and fifty years on shelves, in living rooms, attics, or at flea markets, and book barns. Neither has the inherent value of a rare book. Neither is a first edition, and each was produced in several editions during a few year period. Their popularity at the time of their printing limits their present day rarity.
One, The Art Journal for 1875, is a collection of articles, briefs and notices and shows on its pages the spotting and foxing consistent with its age. But it’s binding is solid, the page’s gilt edges brilliant, and the tooled Moroccan leather worthy of shelf space in a Merchant and Ivory period piece.
The second, the Goethe Gallery, features female characters taken from the works of Goethe as depicted by the German muralist Wilhelm Von Kaulbach. By the time of the book’s production the reader was several degrees removed from Goethe himself. Popular and productive in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Goethe’s characters were illustrated by Kaulbach a generation later. Kaulbach’s works were collected, reproduced as engravings by the photographer Josef Albert and published Friedrich Bruckmann whose Bruckmann Verlag produced the work.
According to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography, Bruckmann’s “first success as a publisher came in the first half of the 1860s with a photographic portfolio of Goethe’s Frauengestalten, the photographs reproducing drawings by the director of the Munich Academy of Arts, Wilhelm Kaulbach. Kaulbach’s so called Goethe-Galerie, drawings of female characters found in Goethe’s fiction was reproduced in large-size photographs by Josef Albert. Bruckmann also issued this work in different techniques, formats and prices (a sales strategy that would become typical for him) and tried to launch a Schiller- and Shakespeare-Galerie as well.”
So the books are available in fair numbers from on-line booksellers. In spite of their age and beauty as art objects themselves they are not terribly expensive.
But in both cases interest has been shown. The prospective purchasers of each were in China. The first purchase of Appleton’s Art Journal was stymied by the disproportionate costs of shipping these heavy large books through international channels (my shipping matrix for international orders has since been adjusted) But the offer on the second-the Goethe Gallery-is still alive pending provision to the prospective buyer of more photos of plates and a count of the plates (there are twenty-one).
So what is the interest?
With my own home decorated—for generations—with framed prints of classical scenes once extracted from much older coffee table books I think I know. Over my shoulder is a Gezigt op de nieuwe brug en tooren der oude kerke, a favorite scene of old Amsterdam still readily found on the internet for one-hundred dollars or so. It’s occupied the same wall space in this room for fifty years or more.
The highest present value of my books is not as a books but as a source of frame-able nineteenth century steel plate engravings of important art work.
One of the twenty-one steel plate engravings in The Goethe Gallery. This one depicts Goethe himself skating in Frankfurt as a youth. Aside from depictions of Goethe the remaining plates depict female characters from his writing.
The knee jerk reaction is opposition. Something says that the book itself was—is—a complete work, a piece of art, a representation of the skills of the book-binders, the engravers, the designers, the leather toolers of the time. The gilt, the marbled paste downs, the fore-edge tapered in a sleek curve to better reflect the gilt, and the Moroccan leather spine demand to remain intact.
Blogs, commentary, and threads on the question suggest that a lot of people feel this way. “Looting” is a term that gets thrown around.
They also suggest a pair of threshold questions, one about degree and one about the remaining essence of the object itself.
The first is an exercise in relativism. After all these are not the Elgin Marbles, or the Benin Bronzes.
But consider other, milder nineteenth century British archeological plunder? For decades the Bowdoin College Museum of Art has displayed its Assyrian reliefs reportedly salvaged from the abandoned ruins of the City of Nimrud in present day Iraq. They’d been obtained by a generous alumnus in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent research and new technology have allowed the museum to project the colors scholars speculate the reliefs might have worn in their original state. A similar relief adorned an open hallway of one of the Middlebury College’s academic buildings back in the day. Considering the upgraded display of the Bowdoin relief I wondered about Middlebury’s. Unsurprisingly its provenance and path to Middlebury was nearly identical to Bowdoin’s relief. It even came from the same merchant, or archeologist, as the case may be. Are there similar works at Amherst, or WIlliams? Yes, indeed. I imagine further research would turn up other examples scattered across the older American college campuses.
Perhaps there was not the will, the capital, or audience to preserve and appreciate the Nimrod reliefs at home in the nineteenth century deserts of the Middle East. Possibly selling and shipping them half a world aways was the only way to preserve them. And of course they were sold—not spirited away like the Elgin Marbles, not straight up theft like the Benin Bronzes.
Which leads to the second more objective question
Does the book—or palace—still function as a book, or a palace, or has time and the elements rendered it mere salvage job. In human terms is it time to check its drivers license to see if it checked “yes” under the organ donor box.
In the case Art Journal and Goethe Gallery, the answer is plainly yes. These are still intact, functioning, readable books. The spots on their pages no more an impediment than the spots on the backs of my hands.
But consider my own walls: a colored engraving “French Troops Retreating Through and Plundering a Village” has fascinated me since childhood, a dead dog lying in a rubbish strewn foreground as soldiers emerge from a basement displaying wine to the horse mounted officers. Scenes of ancient Roman ruins are stacked loosely around the house, still waiting to be framed after years, and years.
Perhaps the frontispiece of Art Journal 1875, “Tintern Abbey — Moonlight on the Wye” an engraving of Benjamin Williams Leader’s work should grace someone else’s walls instead of remaining shelved and gradually adding even more spotting to its margins. Consider also that these books are serving no real purpose now. As I excavate them mining for value and trying to move them to some place where they will serve someone else’s interest should I really be questioning that interest. When a buyer has purchased a slim volume of poetry do I analyze the buyer’s intellectual bonafides or do I package the book and ship it? IThey are for sale after all.
So I am making the photographs and trying to do a careful job. After glancing through the accompanying text by George Henry Lewes, a literary critic of the era, I learn that Lewes was perhaps better known as George Eliot’s life partner.
If the sale goes through—good enough. If not—good enough. Another thing I have learned—the books are both worth more to me now than before.