New Article: “Coffee-table books a XIX-wieczna kultura książki salonowej”
Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 87(2), 2025, 75–100
“Coffee-Table Books and the 19th-Century Culture of the Drawing-Room Book” – English Abstract
The fashion for displaying books on tables of all kinds has a long history, as has the book itself as a decorative object. In the 19th century, drawing-room books – the historical equivalent of today’s coffee-table books, the lavishly illustrated, large-format books designed to be viewed and browsed through rather than read – served both a decorative and a social function, delighting guests and providing entertainment. They included illustrated books, music albums, photographic albums, almanacs and fashion magazines, as well as non-illustrated books such as tastefully bound editions of the Bible, historical works, classic novels, and poetry. In the article, I try to show that in the 19th century, unlike in coffee-table books of today, neither illustration – e.g. photographic illustration – nor general aesthetic value alone turned a publication into a book for salons, that is, a book that was displayed outside the places traditionally assigned to it, such as a bookcase, desk or library. The article introduces a new research topic – the popular 19th-century book as a table and drawing-room ornament, and draws attention to the importance of this type of publication in broader research on the culture of the period.
Book: Nieuznana rewolucja? Polskie książki i fotografia (1856–1883)
Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN, 2023
472 pages, 75 B/W illustrations
Language: Polish
ISBN: 978-83-66519-69-5
An Unacknowledged Revolution? Polish Books and Photography (1856–1883) – Book Summary
In the nineteenth century, small and large revolutions in science, technology, politics and economics were taken for granted. Rapid but unevenly advancing industrialisation, scientific (or pseudo-scientific) discoveries and inventions sparked a series of ‘revolutions’ in print media. Their direct results included an unprecedented proliferation of quickly and cheaply printed publications, new and more efficient strategies for the circulation of information, among others, through illustration, which over time, took up every available space in a book or a newspaper. Proclaimed in 1839, the invention of photography brought about an irreversible change in the ontological status of an image, which since then, has been either a faithful reflection of the reality or a personal interpretation of it, for better or for worse. Nonetheless, what were the actual impacts of the new technology on the day-to-day activities of nineteenth-century photographers, publishers, editors and readers of photographically illustrated publications?
In An Unacknowledged Revolution? Polish Books and Photography (1856–1883), I answer this question in a twofold manner. On a micro-scale, in Part I of the book, I trace the significance of the invention through three carefully selected case studies. On a macro-scale, I portray the phenomenon through a bibliographic corpus of the earliest photographically illustrated publications. Though limited chronologically, geographically and technically, Part II of the book constitutes an extensive corpus of these publications in the Polish lands. The focus is on Polish publications and thus on Polish readership, but I do not wish to look for national specificities of events and circumstances. Rather, with the territorial scope limited to a peripheral area of Europe, it is possible to grasp more clearly the mechanisms behind the transfer of certain ideas and technologies and their heterogeneous adaptation in different geographical, cultural and social contexts.
Thus, I frame the history of photographically illustrated publications as part of the history of photography (i.e., the history of a certain technical invention), which is a universal history but one that also tells a somewhat poignant story of provincial, locally determined practices of implementation.
The chronological span of the material discussed in the book is determined by two dates: 1856 and 1883, the former being the year of publication of the album Wystawa starożytności i przedmiotów sztuki na korzyść Domu Schronienia opieki Najświętszej Maryi P. na Krakowskiem Przedmieściu (Exhibition of Antiquities and Objects of Art for the Benefit of the Shelter House of the Protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street), the first Polish publication illustrated with photographs. The latter marks the beginning of the 1880s – a time of important changes in the culture and technology of printing and photography, or to be more precise, a period of the dynamic development of photomechanical methods of reproduction, which dominated illustrated publications at the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. This is a long-term phenomenon, so I have a priori and symbolically chosen 1883, the bicentennial of the Battle of Vienna, as the end date. The nineteenth century was the century of history (and historicism). The celebrations of an important historical event seemed to be an appropriate closing bracket. Therefore, the last record of the bibliographical corpus is the album Zabytki XVII wieku: jubileuszowa wystawa Jana III w Krakowie 1883 (Monuments of the -Seventeenth Century: The Anniversary Exhibition of John III in Krakow 1883) – a publication not particularly appreciated by contemporaries, in preparation since 1883, but published only in 1884, a year after the jubilee celebrations.
I start the book with a discussion of the definitions of key terms and notions, which is fundamental for my approach (Books and Photography: Keywords). Next, I present an overview of the technological and practical aspects of the presence of photographic illustrations in books (The Anatomy of Photographic Illustration). In this section, I discuss the assigned place of photography in the book and the ways in which knowledge about photography was disseminated in professional literature and newspaper articles.
In the remaining sections of Part I, I deal with three publications selected for the analysis for a variety of reasons, including each one’s distinctive place of publication in one of the three important Polish centres, each in a different partitioned land. In the analysis, I focus on the circumstances and technical aspects of the creation of the publications in question, the people involved in their production, and the ideological, artistic and political contexts that accompanied their publication.
In the first case study (Historical or Artistic Merit), I focus on a pair of albums: (1) the first Polish album illustrated with photographs by Karol Beyer, Wystawa starożytności i przedmiotów sztuki (Exhibition of Antiquities and Objects of Art, 1856) and (2) an important point of reference for the analysis of Beyer’s album, a Prussian book by Alexander von Minutoli, entitled Vorbilder für Handwerker und Fabrikanten aus den Sammlungen des Minutolischen Instituts zur Veredlung der Gewerbe und Befoerderung der Künste zu Liegnitz (Examples for Craftsmen and Fabricators from the Collections of the Minutoli Institute for the Refinement of Trade Materials and the Advancement of the Arts in Liegnitz, 1854). In this study, I propose a course of analysis for future monographs of photographically illustrated Polish publications. My line of enquiry is characterised by a broad examination of the books’ individual biographies – but with the necessary consideration of both their local contexts (i.e., the social or political backgrounds of the people involved in their production) and the transnational context.
In the second case study (The Question of Nationality), I tackle Album wydane staraniem Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk w Poznaniu w czterechsetną rocznicę urodzin Mikołaja Kopernika (Album Published by the Poznan Society of Friends of Science on the Occasion of the Four-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, 1873). Here, I review some technical issues and logistics of this publishing venture, concerning (among other things) subscriptions and printing technology. The album was the first Polish publication illustrated with collotypes, with a relatively high print run of over 2,000 copies. However, in this case, consumer demand was determined, not by the album’s design or the quality of reproductions, but by its proclaimed scientific and national importance and the specific circumstances of its creation.
In the last case study (Patterns and Models), Album ozdób z kaplicy Zygmuntowskiej i z dwóch nagrobków kanonika Stanisława Borka i Wielkiego Marszałka Piotra Kmity w Katedrze Krakowskiej (Album of the Decorations from the Sigismund Chapel and Two Tombs: of Canon Stanislaw and the Grand Marshal Kmita at the Krakow Cathedral, 1878), I present this publication issued by the Board of the Technical and Industrial Museum in Krakow, as a set of patterns to be imitated by craftpersons and art students. The story of a single book is here reconstructed as intertwined with the biography of its publisher, Adrian Baraniecki. I argue that ultimately, the album in question performed best as a branding and image-building tool for the country, the museum and the publisher himself, more so than as an effective solution for improving arts and crafts or industry.
I conclude Part I of the book with a reflection on the consequences of the fact that photography came to Poland as a technical import from the West (On the Reception of Photographically Illustrated Publications in the Polish Lands). I adopt a broader perspective, covering the entire publishing production under discussion, to compile the collection of problems faced by nineteenth-century photographers, authors and publishers. I seek to answer the question of whether it is justified to claim that photographically illustrated Polish publications represented a marginal phenomenon in the nineteenth century, and if so, why. I draw attention to various socioeconomic factors, cited in relevant contemporary sources, which determined the fate of these publications in their specific chronological and geographic contexts. These issues ranged from a lack of cash, to an absence of interest in and support for these kinds of publishing initiatives, to Polish society’s supposed lack of aesthetic taste.
Part II of the book includes the first annotated bibliography of the early photographically illustrated publications in the Polish lands. Through this analytical bibliography, I provide additional scientific and critical commentary, as well as extensive citations from press articles, private correspondence, various types of archival documents and the literature of the time.
I argue that although photographically illustrated publications generated lively interest among journalists and writers in the Polish lands, only in a few cases did this translate into people’s interest in buying them. In the nineteenth century, photography did not immediately replace woodcuts or lithography, just as the invention of print did not replace handwritten manuscripts. It is then both misleading and ahistorical to overemphasise the technology of image reproduction in a book, whereas the nineteenth-century viewer paid more attention to the iconographic layer of a representation rather than the intricacies of a particular technique or technology.
The use of photographic illustration in books was primarily intended to economise (in time and cost) their production. However, for the first few years of its existence in the Polish lands, it was exactly the opposite case – photography was more expensive than other available methods of reproduction. The history of the photographically illustrated book, due to the higher production costs and the involvement of more people in its preparation, was less developed and complex in the areas that lacked the resources for its development. This statement holds true for both the nineteenth century and the present time.