Oooh, art books! These tantalizing coffee-table stunners are hard to resist with their fascinating imagery and top-notch design. Each detail – whether the type of paper or the choice of fonts – demonstrates a rarefied commitment to quality and vision. It’s hard to walk past a book published by Phaidon, Abrams or Taschen, three of the big international players, without a covetous sigh.
Canada isn’t in quite the same league: a less populous country means the market for niche books might well fit in the proverbial telephone booth, if one still existed. It’s challenging for publishers to turn much of a profit when they sell only a thousand copies. So art books can be risky financial ventures in this country, particularly for an industry reeling from closures and takeovers amid the turmoil of globalization and the digital revolution.
Still, art books continue to be published, often in conjunction with exhibitions and subsidized through partnership deals with galleries and, indirectly, by taxpayers via cultural subsidies. But everything that makes art books appealing – the large format, the lavish photography, the quality binding – drives up production costs.
“It’s always been a balancing act because the books are so expensive and the market is small,” says Howard White, the publisher of Vancouver-based Douglas & McIntyre and Harbour Publishing. “It’s difficult to do a lot of books.”
Although he has no industry-wide statistics, he thinks fewer art books are being published these days in Canada. “I do sense there is less being done,” says White, who has been active in publishing since the 1970s.
Of course, some books consistently do well. The Group of Seven and Emily Carr continue to attract buyers, a testament to their enduring importance as Canadian icons. As well, items with international appeal, like Douglas & McIntyre’s 2016 book of photographs by Wade Davis, a National Geographic explorer in residence, can also find buyers in foreign markets.
Authors who cross categories by appealing to different types of readers, also have a better shot at landing a book deal. For instance, Sculpture in Canada, a comprehensive survey released in November by Douglas & McIntyre, will interest a general cultural audience but can also serve as a university textbook. Author Maria Tippett, who has written more than a dozen books on art and cultural history, looks at everything from prehistoric Indigenous work and well-known public monuments to contemporary work by artists like Evan Penny, David Altmejd and Joe Fafard. Written in an accessible style and amply illustrated, it’s a solid addition to the bookshelf.
One particularly active publisher of art books is Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton. Creative director Julie Scriver, one of the main shareholders, describes Goose Lane’s evolution from its early days as a small literary publisher housed in the backyard shed of a former owner. Goose Lane began collaborating with galleries some two decades ago, and has since co-published books with large institutions like the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
For Scriver, finding the kernel of a larger narrative within a gallery’s exhibition is the key to reach a broad range of readers. “We’ve found that working with curators to reshape the focus of the book in small ways to position it for a wider audience has allowed more people to engage with that work and that research,” she says.
One of Goose Lane’s advantages is its capacity to work in French and English – as well as other languages, she says. For instance, this year it co-published SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, the first major publication about the art of the Labrador Inuit, with The Rooms, the provincial art gallery in St. John’s, N.L. The book has editions in French, English and Inuktituk.
One of Goose Lane’s all-time top sellers is about Nova Scotia painter Alex Colville. The book has sold some 6,000 hard-cover copies since it was published in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014. A paperback version that came on stream a few months ago is doing well, says Scriver. Also popular is a 2016 book about Mary Pratt, a Newfoundland artist known for her luminous paintings of domestic scenes. And a recent reissue of a 1997 book, Christmas with Maud Lewis, the famous self-taught artist from rural Nova Scotia, is “flying off the shelf,” she says.
This year, Goose Lane’s offerings include Higher States: Lawren Harris and His American Contemporaries, essentially a companion book for a touring show of the same name organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. The show is on view at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary until Jan. 7. The latest addition to a mini-industry surrounding Harris, the book by prominent art historians Roald Nasgaard and Gwendolyn Owens focuses on the artist’s abstract work and interior life while situating him within a larger international framework. It’s an appealing book with ample illustrations.
Another Goose Lane book that's due out soon is At Home: Talks with Canadian Artists about Place and Practice by Lezli Rubin-Kunda, an artist from Toronto who now lives in Israel. She interviewed some 50 artists, including Western Canadians Amalie Atkins and Aganetha Dyck, about how concepts relating to home inform their work.
Art books are a major focus at Figure 1 Publishing, a Vancouver company started in 2013 by two former employees of D&M Publishers, Richard Nadeau and Chris Labonté, along with Peter Cocking, who has since left the company. Figure 1 follows a hybrid model that bridges traditional publishing and self-publishing. This typically means an artist or gallery pays the cost of production, while Figure 1 looks after editing, design, distribution and marketing. Sales revenues are shared.
Labonté, the publisher, positions Figure 1 as a Phaidon wannabe with its similar focus on the creative sector – art, architecture, cooking and design. “These are expensive books – not in terms of retail prices – but expensive books to produce,” says Labonté. “They are time consuming and it requires certain types of expertise, which is not inexpensive. So we’re always looking for ways to make the book work financially.”
This year, Figure 1 published Morrice in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada. The book treads traditional ground with its singular focus on a historical artist, James William Morrice, who was influenced by Impressionism and spent much of his life in Europe. The book and its related exhibition are based on work donated by A.K. Prakash, a former federal public servant who became a passionate art collector. The book, with essays by various art historians, including Katerina Atanassova, the gallery’s senior curator of Canadian art, is scholarly. But with 49 colour plates, it will also appeal to more casual readers. The show will tour to the Art Gallery of Alberta from July 20 to Oct. 7.
Another interesting Figure 1 book this year is The Good Lands: Canada Through the Eyes of Artists. It opens with Chief Dan George’s Lament for Confederation, delivered in Vancouver on July 1, 1967, and, at its core, grapples with the concept of reconciliation through the lens of art. The project, led by Victoria Dickenson, a former director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, includes contributors such as Gerald McMaster, a Plains Cree and Blackfoot artist and curator, and Lee Maracle, a poet from the Stô:lo Nation in British Columbia. The book is structured around statements by five curators, each leading to works related to a loose theme such as “the militarized landscape” or “painting the air.” Some images share adjacent pages uneasily but, overall, it’s an engaging selection of work that allows one to ruminate about the land, art history, concepts of nationhood and the changing times.
Any roundup of art books would be incomplete without mentioning contributions by various small presses. For instance, Salt Spring Island’s Mother Tongue Publishing has released a book a year over the last decade as part of its Unheralded Artists of B.C. series. The final book in the series, The Life and Art of Arthur Pitts, by art historian Kerry Mason, explores the contributions of Pitts, whose watercolours captured scenes of West Coast Indigenous life in the 1900s. Similarly, Rocky Mountain Books, which is based in Victoria, has released a number of recent photography books, including Seeking Stillness, which features black-and-white photographs of the Western landscape by Calgary-based Olivier Du Tré.
University presses also contribute to the art book ecosystem, often with scholarly studies for serious readers. McGill-Queen’s University Press, for instance, had a particularly active year. Along with Spaces and Places for Art, Anne Whitelaw’s look at the growth of public art galleries in Western Canada, it’s releasing a history of the first 60 years of the Canada Council for the Arts, The Roots of Culture, the Power of Art, by Monica Gattinger, a professor at the University of Ottawa.
Meanwhile, the University of Toronto Press published The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art by Claudette Lauzon It's a dense read that comes with an intriguing tag line: “In a world where the notion of home is more traumatizing than it is comforting, artists are using this literal and figurative space to reframe human responses to trauma.”