Museum Books
for the Masses
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (OCTOBER 2002)
The
tenth International Museum Publishing Seminar,
produced by the Graham School of General Studies
at the University of Chicago, returned to its
city of origin for a three-day affair beginning September
26. And judging by the diverse roster of museum types
who flocked to the biannual event, it wasn’t a moment
too soon: the show boasted its second-highest attendance
after New York City four years ago (245 attendees turned
out), a gratifying number, according to co-organizer
Susan Rossen of the Art Institute of Chicago,
given the rampant budget-slashing and other siege-like
conditions under which many museums now struggle. Indeed,
over the course of the seminar, the sharply clashing
demands of mission statements and profit-taking mandates
were never far from the surface, as it seems benefactors’
cash donations become more difficult to extract, or
— given the fate of notable high-flying trustees such
as Vivendi’s Jean Marie Messier and Tyco’s
Dennis Kozlowski — get one’s hands on before
the Feds and shareholders do.
The proceedings kicked off with a keynote from the AAP’s
ubiquitous CEO and President, Pat Schroeder,
who delivered a ringing defense of intellectual property,
and outlined the efforts made by the AAP to combat piracy
on every front. It proved a fitting overture to this
event, as many participants demonstrated a heightened
sophistication about the publishing process, and a concerted
effort to do battle with their ongoing — but perhaps
no longer intractable — sales and distribution demons.
Accordingly, one well-received tactic for bumping up
sales went right to the fine print of the matter, that
being the scholarly minutiae that too often clog up
the page. At a panel discussing the gap between popular
and scholarly markets, the general agreement on this
point was that the issue had less to do with content
than with its presentation. Best idea: consign the footnotes
and scholarly apparatus to the back of the book. Or
even better, advised MoMA’s Michael Maegraith,
put it online where academics may refer to it as needed
or desired. Beyond this route to “popularizing” academic
titles, Chris Hudson, Publisher at the Getty
Museum, observed that some museums are now popping
out two texts for each show: one for the aesthetes,
and one for the masses. “A noticeable trend was the
move toward revenue-positive, shorter, accessible, popular
books for exhibitions,” he said, “rather than or in
addition to the big scholarly catalogs.” As a case in
point, Susan Rossen spoke about the Art Institute’s
success with their Van Gogh/Gauguin exhibition catalogs,
which proved that smaller can indeed be surprisingly
saleable. They had 12,000 net sales for the 400-page
edition at $39.95, which paled beside the 61,000 net
sales of the $12.95, 80-page edition. (If you do the
math, gross revenue for the latter was 65% higher than
that of the more expensive tome.)
MoMA,
or Macy’s?
Another
major seminar theme, strongly voiced by DAP’s
Sharon Gallagher and echoed by Richard Dobbs,
formerly book buyer at MoMA and now at HarperCollins
(see Book View), targeted
the disparity between a museum’s mission and the role
played by its retail outlets. Publishing and retail
have been at loggerheads, said Dobbs, because the quest
for profits can turn museum shops into department stores
— their managers often hail from that community — peddling
jewelry and tchotchkes while consigning books to some
distant corner. “Retail exists to support the institution,”
Dobbs asserted, “not the other way around.” Gallagher
stressed that books should represent 30% to 40% of a
museum store’s sales, particularly mission-driven titles
not typically ordered by the major chain booksellers.
There were also two relatively arcane panels: one on
digital reproduction, which was thankfully held in check
by the Art Institute’s own Sarah Guernsey (“Matt:
What exactly IS a CMYK file?”); and Web 101, where Barry
Aprison, Director of Chicago’s Museum of Science
and Industry, gave a virtual tour of the museum’s
inventive web site.
In his closing address, Neil Harris of the University
of Chicago’s History department delivered a brilliant
and succinct outline of the history of American museums.
But the shot-in-the-arm tenor of the seminar was perhaps
best summed up by the Getty’s Chris Hudson. “Managing
changes like this isn’t easy, and the conference did
a great job in energizing us to do so,” he said. “Now
we just need to refine that into some sort of intravenous
drip that will fortify us for the next year and a half.”
Those
in need of an interim fixer-upper may want to pencil
in the annual meeting of the International Association
of Museum Publishers, which takes place on Wednesday,
October 9 from 3:30-6:00 p.m. on the Frankfurt Book
Fair grounds, at the Symmetrie 2 conference room, in
Hall 8.1.
©2002
Publishing Trends
