WORLDWIDE BOOKS

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Dear Subscriber,

Bulletin

In 1963, Worldwide Books began publishing The Worldwide Art Catalogue Bulletin, a quarterly journal that documented exhibition catalogues newly selected for inclusion in the Worldwide Books Approval Plan Program. Each issue featured bibliographic records and brief abstracts describing some 200 catalogues produced by museums and galleries throughout the world, with the entries arranged geographically.

 

When the Bulletin first appeared, it had an annual subscription price of just $20 and was the only periodical devoted exclusively to documenting museum and gallery publications. Although the journal also served as Worldwide's sales catalogue, many library subscribers chose to bind the quarterly issues and annual indexes, recognizing the permanent value of the abstracts for researchers. Published from 1963 to 1987, the Bulletin ultimately served to document some 17,500 exhibition catalogues.

 

The bibliographic records that appeared in the Bulletin are themselves now included on our Web site (where every title we have ever chosen for inclusion in our Approval Plan Program remains listed permanently for reference purposes) and still reference the Bulletin volume and issue number in which each abstract appeared, enabling researchers to easily locate the printed abstracts at libraries that have retained the journal in their reference collections.

 

Now, nearly fifty years later, our electronic newsletter is made available to subscribers free of charge and provides a convenient link to our Web site, where each monthly list of new titles can be filtered in various ways to produce highly focused bibliographies based on such criteria as artistic medium, historical period, country of publication, and language of text, obviating the need for the annual indexes that were compiled so labor-intensively a half century ago.

 

The Bulletin was produced in an era when information about international exhibition catalogues was much more difficult to locate than it is in the digital age, but the motivation behind our monthly electronic newsletter is much the same: to present carefully selected titles from around the world to a specialized audience of art librarians, saving them the time and effort it would take to research and acquire these books from a multitude of sources.

 

Over the past 50 years, the number of art exhibition catalogues and other art books produced annually has grown exponentially. Major catalogues are now more likely to be co-published with trade or university presses, which makes them less obscure and more likely to be available from various non-specialized booksellers. Yet, each month Worldwide Books continues to offer a large number of international catalogues that do not have commercial distribution and that remain the purview of knowledgeable and specialized booksellers.

 

With the development of the Internet, obscurity has become less of an issue, and finding basic information on non-commercial catalogues is much less difficult than it once was. However, the challenge of providing libraries with information that is also accurate and reliable remains. And being able to reliably supply the publications themselves -- including titles published in short print runs by museums, galleries and other publishers that may not be familiar with or interested in international distribution -- continues to be one of our primary areas of expertise. We pride ourselves on our ability to guide clients in careful and systematic collection development and to help them separate the wheat from the chaff -- a skill honed by five decades of experience.

 

As we celebrate our 50th year, we remain committed to providing exceptional service in an efficient, knowledgeable and customer-friendly manner, and we thank our clients for their loyalty and support.

 

 

50th Anniversary Guestbook  

As part of our ongoing 50th anniversary celebrations, we have added a guestbook to our Web site. Be among the first to sign it or to share a story about your dealings with Worldwide Books over the course of the past 50 years.
 
We would love to hear from you!

New Titles 

Overview

To view all the new titles that we first listed in June, click here

To filter the list by subject, use our Advanced Search page and select "June 2012" from the Recent Arrivals menu in combination with any other parameter or keyword to obtain relevant results on specific subjects, or choose one of the main categories below.

By region:vertical

Western
Asia  |  Europe  |  Middle East/North Africa  |  Latin America   
U.S.  |  Canada  |  Australia  |  Russia
 
 
 
By medium:

Painting  |  Drawing  |  Prints  |  Sculpture
Photography  |  Video  |  Installation Art          
Architecture  |  Interior Design  |  Graphic Design  |  Fashion


By period:

300-1400   |  1400-1600  |  1600-1800  |  1800-1900  |  1900-1945
Post-1945  |  Post-1970  |  Post-1990  |  Post-2000


By topic:

Decorative Arts  |  Women Artists  |  Urban Planning  |  Design


By approval plan:

Plan 1 (Basic)  |  Plan 2 (Supplemental)  |  Plan 7 (English text)


By type of publisher:

Trade press  |  University press  |  Non-trade/Non-university press


By language of text:

English  |  French  |  German  |  Italian  |  Spanish

 
 
Oil Paintings in Public Ownership  

  

Since 2003, the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) has been on a mission to inventory an estimated 200,000 oil paintings that are held in public ownership throughout the United Kingdom. A network of researchers and photographers across the country are working to photograph and document each painting in order to make these collections available to the general public online, as well as through a series of books dedicated to the holdings of individual counties in the UK.

    

PCF

The PCF catalogues

© Andrew Ellis

For many years, the Oil Paintings in Public Ownership titles were distributed in North America through Antique Collectors' Club (ACC), and Worldwide has been carrying them since the first volume was published in 2004. As of August 1 of this year, the distribution agreement between the PCF and ACC will end. However, Worldwide will continue to offer existing and forthcoming volumes in the series, obtaining copies directly from the Foundation and continuing to provide coverage to libraries that subscribe to the series or have been receiving the volumes from us on approval. As a result of our arrangement with the PCF, we expect to be able to obtain copies of current and new publications more quickly than before, and -- since the Foundation's entire backlist is currently available -- we can readily fill gaps in library collections that may have been created as supplies of the titles became exhausted in the U.S. Several titles that were never distributed in North America are now available to us as well (Worldwide 76484, 76496 and 76507).

 

Currently, 35 titles have been published and eleven more will be released this year. Most of the volumes document all of the oil paintings held in public ownership in a given county while a few document the holdings of major museums (e.g. Worldwide 68872) or city collections (e.g. Worldwide 71297). The works are listed by collection (museums, universities, town halls etc.), and are reproduced in color with concise entries. Brief introductions to each volume discuss the origins and nature of the various collections.  

 

 

 

  
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For 50 years, Worldwide Books has served academic, museum and public libraries as a specialized source for art exhibition catalogues issued by museums and galleries throughout the world. For the past two decades Worldwide has also offered comprehensive coverage of new books on art, architecture, photography and design published by hundreds of leading American trade and university presses. Serving as a centralized source for a wide range of scholarly art books and exhibition catalogues, Worldwide is uniquely positioned to assist and guide art libraries in careful and efficient collection development.

 

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