Errata Editions' First Two Titles

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Books on Books #1
Atget: Photographe de Paris
Essays by Pierre Mac Orlan, David Campany, and Jeffrey Ladd
Hardcover w/ Dustjacket
116 pp, 9.5 x 7 in.
110 4-color illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-935004-00-4
$39.95 ($26.37 at Amazon)

Books on Books #2
Walker Evans: American Photographs
Essays by Lincoln Kirstein, John T. Hill, and Jeffrey Ladd
Hardcover w/ Dustjacket
112 pp, 9.5 x 7 in.
98 Duotone and 4-color illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-935004-02-8
$39.95 ($26.37 at Amazon)

One of the common themes of photo book reviews has been how quickly even the best titles go out of print, making it a challenge to acquire books in your area of interest before they disappear. Even more difficult is trying to build a library of genuinely important photo books, those that have made a mark on photography as a whole. Some show up as reprints (John Szarkowski's Looking at Photographs comes to mind), only to disappear again before you hear about them. Wouldn't it be grand if someone started releasing reprints or facsimiles of the classics?

We now have an interesting source for such books. Errata Editions is a small publishing house formed in 2008 by Valerie Sonnenthal, Jeffrey Ladd and Ed Grazda. Sonnenthal is a photo editor/curator; Ladd and Grazda are photographer/educators. Jeffrey Ladd you may recognize as the eclectic mind behind 5B4, a photo book review website that seems to emphasize unique, offbeat and avant-garde titles. The initial announcement back in September 2008 was tantalizing, but I couldn't really visualize what they had in mind until I saw the resulting books. The first four titles are now available.

These are compact cloth-bound volumes with partial dust jacket, printed to a standard size. On the dust jacket, and repeated inside, is a color reproduction of the original cover. Following this is a complete page-for-page photo reproduction of the original, showing both text and photographs. Some spreads are reproduced two to a page, others full size. To be clear these are not reproductions of just the images, but photo reproductions of the actual book pages, as if you had it open on your desk. The result is a facsimile that demonstrates precisely what the original book looks like, conveying the photographers' and designers' intent. The downside is that both text and images are frequently reproduced too small to appreciate nuance and detail. Large multiple page stretches of text are abridged, showing the opening and concluding spreads.

Following the facsimile pages in each book are complete reprints of the original text, set in Adobe Garamond type at a readable size, followed by an essay placing the original in historical and artistic context. Next is a formal review of the original book's printing and typographical design. Finally each volume is closed with a thumbnail biography of the artist and a bibliography of their works.

Eugène Atget: Photographe de Paris is the first volume in the series. The four-color photo reproduction accurately shows the warm burgundy tones of the collotype original plates, though shadows go very murky. Following the facsimile pages is a translation of the original preface by Pierre Mac Orlan. Next is an insightful discussion of Atget's work, its rescue from oblivion by a young Berenice Abbott, and its place in the context of the art world circa 1930, by David Campany. Jeffrey Ladd then details the actual printing of the original book, including the collotype plates. (The curious reader may want to check out The Printed Picture, by Richard Benson, for more detail on the process).

Walker Evans: American Photographs is the second volume, reprising this hugely influential work. The facsimile pages accurately show the simple, unadorned design of the book. The quality of the duotone reproductions is quite good, particularly those shown full size. They are followed by the complete text of the essay by Lincoln Kirstein that accompanied the photographs. Next is a detailed account by John T. Hill of the creation of the original book. This was a collaboration between Evans, the very young Museum of Modern Art, and the famed printer and book designer Joseph Blumenthal, with patron Kirstein also serving an important rôle. Jeffrey Ladd then discusses the various editions and printings American Photographs has gone through over the years.

I find myself a bit conflicted regarding Errata Editions' worthy effort. This is clearly a labor of love, and the amount of work involved prodigious. The resulting volumes give readers the chance to own facsimiles of photography's seminal books. They accurately display the sequence of images as well as the intent of the original design. If you want to see what the fuss was about over American Photographs, this reproduction will show you. For a modest outlay you can start building a library of the most influential photo books ever printed, in facsimile form. If you understand that these are "meta-books"—that their subject is the photo book rather than the photographs per se—you may be delighted with them.

On the other hand, the relatively small size of these books, and the third generation facsimile photo reproduction, can't do justice to the original images. Readers who want a good idea of what Atget's photographs really look like should try to find a used copy of John Szarkowski's Atget monograph for its much larger, clearer reproductions. Walker Evans' photographs fare much better, but they're still a bit cramped by the format.

Geoff

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Comments

[John Krill]

Why do photography books use the portrait format when landscape should be?

[Mike Johnston]

John,
I have lots of "landscape" format photo books. ...In which vertical pictures don't fit very well, of course. It's six to one half a dozen the other, methinks.

Mike

[Nick Meertens]

I have the Walker Evans and am delighted, as Geoff puts it.
It's nice to be able see what the original book looked like and which pictures where included. And for the modest price that's a good deal in my opinion.
If, however, it's just about the pictures, don't bother, they do not give more than an impression of the original reproduction.
Best, Nick

[ycl]

Thanks to Geoff once again for a great review.

"Errata Editions" makes a lot of sense for some books, where the "art work" at issue -- from the photographer / artist's perspective -- is the book itself (rather than, e.g., any particular image or a particular print of an image). I've long read / heard that Evans's "American Photographs" is precisely such a work -- that the final product, including the precise sequencing of images and placement of text vs. photos, was intended by Evans as THE final "work of art," so it seems a must buy.

(The same would be true for, say, Robert Frank's "The Americans." I think it was A.D. Coleman who said that buying fancy prints of Frank's for thousands of dollars was a bit silly, given that the "work of art" was not any particular image or print, but the book itself.)

The same can't be said for the Atget, though. The original was published posthumously, after all. I gather that it was an important and influential book that disseminated Atget's work to a larger audience. So, it may be of interest from a book collecting perspective, or for those interested in the history of photography. But for those interested in Atget as a photographer / artist, Geoff's suggestion of the Szarkowski volume(s) seems right on.

[scott kirkpatrick]

The Walker Evans retrospective at the Met generated a lovely volume (printed and produced by the Princeton University Press) in 2000, with a re-issue in 2004. The paperback version of that is available at Amazon, and I doubt that either paper or hardback will be out of print for too long. My only reason to purchase the "meta-book" would be to see in detail which pictures (for which I have better reproductions) were actually in American Photographs and how they were sequenced.

scott

[Marco Sabatini]

I remember you sometimes wrote that "The photographer's eye", by J. Szarkowski, is out of print. I tried to get a copy from italian booksellers, without success. Then I looked for it on www.ebay.de, and finally got two copies. At present there are 32. Someone even new.

[Mike Johnston]

Marco,
"The Photographer's Eye" is currently in print. It's "Looking at Photographs" that is currently not available new.

Mike

[Ken Tanaka]

Thank you for these reviews, Geoff. You've answered questions I had as I recently pondered purchasing one of these.

[Jonathon Delacour]

Although I was already aware of the Errata Editions, until I read this review I had simply assumed that a classic book such as "American Photographs" would be currently available as an inexpensive reprint. But checks on Amazon, AbeBooks, and Alibris revealed nothing currently in print and prices ranging from US$295 to US$2000 for 1938 editions -- with one Amazon seller asking US$529.99 for a 1960 reprint in only "Good" condition.

It seems astonishing that a book that is described on the Errata website as "arguably the most important photobook ever published" is now only available in a facsimile edition that cannot (in Nick Meertens words) "give more than an impression of the original reproduction".

Walker Evans is the photographer I admire above all others. Consequently, I have first edition copies of "American Photographs", "Let us now Praise Famous Men", and "Many Are Called", each of which I was able to purchase relatively inexpensively 25 to 30 years ago. However, I also have a 1975 East River Press edition of "American Photographs" (for which I paid AU$10.15), described on the copyright page as "REPRINTED FROM THE FIRST EDITION, NEW YORK, 1938". I'm in no way an expert but the quality of the reproduction in this reprint so closely matches that of the original edition that it appears the same plates were used.

It is difficult to believe that the original plates were lost or destroyed. Even if this was the case, why is it not possible to make new prints from Evans's negatives in order to produce a reasonably priced reprint of this marvelous book?

[Mike Johnston]

Jonathon,
This is one reason I'm always badgering people to buy good reprints when they're available. I have the 50th Anniversary edition of "American Photographs," published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1988 and distributed by Little, Brown. It closely follows the original in form and content, with several newer essays added (the slight introduction for the 1962 reprint is included, for example).

But the 50th Anniversary edition is now long out of print, and quite scarce itself.

You would think that these things could be kept in print, but current tax law and the difficult economics of publishing work against it.

Mike

[Geoff Wittig]

Jonathon-
The photographs of the original 1938 edition of American Photographs were reproduced via photoengraved half-tone letterpress plates made by at Beck & Co, Philadelphia. This method could produce beautiful results in skilled hands, but was labor-intensive and fraught with problems. As detailed in John T. Hill's essay in the Errata Editions version, a complete set of plates were (very expensively) scrapped prior to printing because of their poor quality. The method was not well suited to mass production due to the great difficulty of getting an even impression. Plates were routinely scrapped and recycled when printing was done, so re-printing from the original plates was rarely possible. After WWII, offset lithography quickly took over for photo reproduction because it was far more practical.