Museum and Gallery Publishing

From Theory to Case Study

Sarah Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317093091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Museum and Gallery Publishing examines the theory and practice of general and scholarly publishing associated with museum and art gallery collections. Focusing on the production and reception of these texts, the book explains the relevance of publishing to the cultural, commercial and social contexts of collections and their institutions.

Combining theory with case studies from around the world, Sarah Anne Hughes explores how, why and to what effect museums and galleries publish books. Covering a broad range of publishing formats and organisations, including heritage sites, libraries and temporary exhibitions, the book argues that the production and consumption of printed media within the context of collecting institutions occupies a unique and privileged role in the creation and communication of knowledge. Acknowledging that books offer functions beyond communication, Hughes argues that this places books published by museums in a unique relationship to institutions, with staff acting as producers and visitors as consumers.The logistical and ethical dimensions of museum and gallery publishing are also examined in depth, including consideration of issues such as production, the impact of digital technologies, funding and sponsorship, marketing, co-publishing, rights, and curators' and artists' agency.

Focusing on an important but hitherto neglected topic, Museum and Gallery Publishing is key reading for researchers in the fields of museum, heritage, art and publishing studies. It will also be of interest to curators and other practitioners working in museums, heritage and science centres and art galleries.

1 Why museum and art gallery publishing?

Why do museums and art galleries publish books? Exhibitions, public ­programming and websites offer exciting and innovative ways to communicate with their publics. So, what do books offer that these forms of audience engagement do not? And, what purposes continue to drive the publication of printed materials when collections can now be shared online? This book attempts to answer these and other questions and aims to explain the relevance of publishing to the cultural, commercial and social contexts of collections and their institutions. In the process, a sweep of academic fields will be crossed as the topic is not easily contained by a single disciplinary boundary and touches on book history, literary studies, audience, museum and visitor studies. Communication is essentially the purpose of publishing—that is, the dissemination of intellectual property, and this practice has a long association with museums, art galleries, scientific collections such as natural history museums and botanic gardens, heritage centres and libraries. In the chapters that follow, I consider how, why and to what effect these institutions publish books and offer insights into a topic that has largely been neglected by current research in both print culture and museum studies. I argue that the production and consumption of printed media within the context of collecting institutions occupies a unique and privileged role in the creation and communication of knowledge built by these cultural and scientific entities. Further, it is not only the textual and illustrative content which constitutes this communicative function; the physical form of the book makes an essential contribution to its role in the museum, not least because of its value as a saleable commodity. I argue for printed books as locales where the authority of museums and galleries is made explicit along with the agency of the associated curatorial scholarship. In the uses that visitors acknowledge of their museum books, I locate a willing alignment with the cultural capital of collections.

The absence of any concerted consideration of publishing by museums is surprising given the visibility of books in museum shops, their long history in support of collections and their contribution to communication and audience development for museum visitors. Museum publishing takes place in a complex landscape of agents, commercial influences and cultural factors which makes it a potentially rewarding area for investigation with relevance for contemporary museums as well as current publishing. And, museums and art galleries offer a more complex environment than that for commercial publishing. Part of the complexity results from the many different agents, such as curators, directors, artists and sponsors, who affect the production processes. The reception of museum books, that is, their reading, occurs under various institutional influences and to further complicate investigations museums produce many different types of books, including guide books, catalogues—for permanent collections and temporary exhibitions—catalogues raisonnés, monographs, technical reports, themed studies, schools’ literature, children’s books, artists’ monographs, apps, e-books, limited editions and facsimiles. Although the kinds of books just cited are the main categories, poetry, fiction, manga and magazines also emanate from collections. There are few museums or art galleries that create all of these, although national institutions in the US and in European countries take a lead in offering books and digital products that address most of the categories. Institutions with smaller collections, more limited budgets or with a regional or local audience offer at least a guidebook and may aspire to occasional additional publications relating to their collections or exhibitions. To further complicate things, museums co-produce books with other institutions, contract out publishing to commercial companies and sell books produced by other publishers as adjuncts to their exhibitions and public programmes.

However complicated the processes underlying the production of museum books, these objects are naturally associated with collections as authentic carriers of information for intellectual consumption and entertainment. The economic contribution of book sales to many institutions is substantial, and it is also as carriers of cultural value that books contribute to collecting institutions. My investigation of museum books recognises that this cultural phenomenon, the book, operates beyond the mere delivery of written language and is consumed for purposes other than reading. It is these many and disparate functions that influence personal responses to reading and to books. Our own histories of reading for entertainment, instruction, relaxation and education affect the ways we respond to and consume books. It is likely that your established reading practices with museum books will inform your response to the ideas set out in the following chapters.

Books offer functions beyond communication as carriers of informational text. I argue that these functions, within the context of museums and art galleries, place books in a unique relationship to the institutions, their staff as producers and their visitors as consumers. Further, the agency and authority of producers in exploiting the intellectual property inherent in collections are made apparent in museum and art gallery books. The longevity of books preserves the authority of this field of study as it is construed and constructed by the curation and research of collecting institutions. In the following chapters, we will see how this authority and the associated relationships play out to enable producers and consumers to display personal and institutional identities, to mark career progression and to align with the authority associated with collections. My premise is that these uses of the production of museum publishing have to date been overlooked in the study of museum communication and that this area would repay concerted research attention. I also identify benefits to print culture, book history and reader studies from research into the production and reception of museum books. As a commodity, books offer commercial functions through the sale receipts that generate income, and as physical objects, they act as temporal devices such as souvenirs or memorials, as archival or data sources and for reuse or recycling. Some of these features are relevant to both print and museum studies. In fact, the intersection of the disciplines active in the study of museum publishing offers a rich area for study with potential for impact on both fields. For example, a book is an object imbued with plasticity; that is to say, within broad parameters the design and physical features that constitute a book may occur in unlimited combinations. While every book within an edition is identical between titles, there is an infinite number of forms comprised of variations in typography, page layout, navigational structures such as title pages, chapter markers and section breaks and physical forms such as paper and binding. The design and form of one book type, the exhibition catalogue, has been transformed in response to the requirement for sales revenue. I conjecture that the changes traced in some, but not all, exhibition books result from the resolution of tensions between the agency of publishers with one aim for the book and that of curatorial scholars with a very different purpose.

Publishing—scope, scale and museums

Understanding the scope and scale of publishing will help place subsequent discussions into context. Publishing at its simplest is a process that orders, designs and disseminates intellectual property. Three main functions support this enterprise—editing, production and sales. Thompson (2012:19) expands these functions to encompass ‘content acquisition and list building, financial investment and risk-taking, content development, quality control, management and coordination and sales and marketing’. One of the characteristic features of publishing is that these functions operate at a range of scales. By this, I mean that a publishing enterprise may be part of a multinational conglomerate such as Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 contributing imprints covering publishing for the academic and professional, fiction, illustrated lifestyle and children’s markets. At the other end of the scale, a small multitasking staff may publish from an office. In between these extremes are independents such as Thames & Hudson, with over 2,000 titles in print, and large university presses such as Yale University Press, with offices in New Haven, CT, and London. Clearly, the annual output of books from publishing companies will vary according to the resources available, and publishers make extensive use of external suppliers to expand production. For example, freelance individuals contribute copyediting and proofreading services, and digital technologies allow production to be carried out in any part of the world. Companies based in Asia offer overnight services in design and layout, and companies based in Hong Kong, China and some Middle Eastern countries provide low-cost printing services. However, museum books demand quality production with accurate colour printing and a short delivery lead time so that the books are in place for scheduled events such as the opening events of exhibitions. For these reasons, many European museum publishers use printing companies in Europe.

These brief comments on trade publishing identify salient features of a creative industry which operates on a local, regional and global scale, that is composed of various commercial suppliers, is influenced and disrupted by digital technologies and delivers products and services in a variety of formats to disparate markets. This is the context in which to understand the production of books by collecting institutions. The objective of this investigation is printed books. Digital publishing is considered where relevant, but the focus is on print for the following reasons. First, books in printed format have proved resilient despite digital disruptions and remain viable as a publishing product, particularly for art collections. Second, the sale of printed books makes a considerable contribution to the funding of museums and galleries, unlike online delivery of digital products which are usually offered as free resources. Digital dissemination of museum intellectual property is considered when it intersects with print, such as in scholarly publishing where the results of research are usually distributed online or as downloadable files. This book omits some aspects of publishing by collections. It focuses on publishing for general or academic audiences, but not the publication of materials for teachers or those who accompany children on school visits, and I am not concerned with activities or worksheets for use by children and families in the museum. Multimedia resources aimed at engaging online audiences are not included, and neither are apps. These omissions are based on the premise that such resources are usually free and therefore do not support museum income. A further feature of museum publishing influences the selection and presentation of case studies. Art institutions produce more books annually for the general public than collections such as those in natural history museums and science centres. For this reason, examples and case studies are disproportionately concerned with publishing from art and historical museums. Science publishing is addressed where relevant, and this is primarily in relation to research.

Interdisciplinary fields of study

The current fields of study encompassing text, books, readers and print culture originate in the study of the dissemination of written language. As an emerging discipline, contributions from various authors (see, for example, van der Vaal 2014; Willison 2009; Greetham 2009; Howsam 2006; Finkelstein and McCleery, 2006) offer perspectives on what constitutes this field and its relationship to other culturally animated areas of print. New disciplines coalesce from and carve out areas from established fields. The studies of books are equally required to argue for attention. Without doubt the study of books crosses traditional academic boundaries, so that the investigation of publishing generally, and by museums specifically, is theorised by concepts from diverse fields. Print culture is a relatively recent scholarly endeavour and consequently draws on frameworks associated with more established disciplines that view a book as ‘a written text, a material object, and a cultural transaction’ (Howsam 2006:vii). These functions are addressed individually; in the first instance, I consider museum books as commodities for sale. I report on the physical form of museum books that reflects the influences of agents such as curators, artists and sponsors. I then examine how museum books are read and consumed as cultural objects. In all this, commercial and cultural study investigates the museum book through a lens of production and reception communication processes and through this order—text, material object, cultural entity—aims to understand the complex relationships active in museum publishing.

A theoretical frame from which to systematically investigate these functions is offered in Thompson’s (2012:3–4) adaptation of Bourdieu’s concept of a field as a ‘structured space … occupied by agents and organisations whose power … depends on the type and quantity of resources or “capital” they have at their disposal’. Fields are composed of ‘different kinds and quantities of power and resources’ and within these fields are found different ‘practices … competition, collaboration and reward’. Applying this concept to publishing, we can see that fields correlate with the published products and markets, such as the categories of publications listed earlier, each with their specific characteristics and readers. The agents such as directors, curators, editors, museum retailers, sponsors and commercial publishers operated within ‘complex relations of power, competition [and] cooperation’ (4) and ‘the power of any agent or organisation is dependent on the kinds and qualities of resources or capital that it possesses’ (5). The following example demonstrates how agency, negotiation, power and resources coalesce in the publication of an exhibition catalogue and is presented to show how this characterisation is useful in comprehending the relationships at play in museum book production. In this case, curators are a starting point. As agents influencing the written and physical form of the book, they exercise power in the negotiated processes of publishing. Curatorial writing draws on the scholarship that underlies their research roles in the creation and study of collections. Research undergirds the creation and presentation of exhibitions and catalogues and is part of a curator’s remit. Turning to another agent in the production of exhibition books, publishers are tasked with producing these catalogues to budget and on schedule. They are also responsible for the sales of these books, and the derived income to the institution, and for this reason work towards a visually aesthetic book that offers text that is accessible for a general audience. It is in the text, structure and form of the book that the negotiation and power plays out between these two agents. Curatorial writing in a style and register that is appropriate for an academic audience with the conventions of footnotes and appendices does not necessarily appeal to the general reader. Resolution of these different requirements for individual museum books occurs during the production processes and at department and director level, but these issues usually remain open to be played out in subsequent museum publishing projects.

This description characterises negotiations that are usually resolved at management levels above that of individual staff but that may reoccur within the pr...