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 this month’s 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.
