Thursday 16 April 2009

A new era for "Out of print"

Eugène Atget's Photographe de Paris. Photograph: Errata Editions


From The Guardian
By Liz Jobey

......a new series of photography books about photography books. If this sounds a bit like trainspotting, it probably is. But one of the main growth areas in photography over the past decade has been the interest in photographic books – not so much in new titles (though there has been a definite expansion there), but in second-hand books, the ones that are increasingly rare, out of print, and out of the range of most pockets.

Errata Editions, a small American press, has just launched its first four titles, based on the idea – which, as far as I know, has never been tried before – of presenting rare and out-of-print books in their original formats: not as facsimile editions or reprints, but as page-by-page reproductions, scanned from the original, displayed in their original sequences, with their original texts (translated into English where necessary), title pages, colophons and even errata slips.

Each book has a new essay by a contemporary photo historian, a short biography of the photographer, data about the original publication – where it was printed, how many copies, etc – and a list of other titles by the same photographer. In other words, each Errata book acts as a kind of host to its original title.

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