Editorial

Editorial 1 — May 2007

Dear friends of contemporary book arts,

Here it is: the new “Compendium of Contemporary Book Art” – in the form of a website!

We decided on this step into a new age even though the annual publishing of our yearbook “Bartkowiaks forum book art” has always been the happening of the year for my colleagues and me.

Yet it would be economically unreasonable to cling to these habits because the overwhelming advantages of the internet are obvious: you can send and download news and images as fast and cheaply as never before. This is the opportunity always to be up-to-date that we could never achieve with our printed yearbook. Being up-to-date is very important if you would like to be informed in time about fairs, exhibitions and special happenings. Being up-to-date is also an important issue for collectors who collect works by topics, artists or authors. Often one title that had come out in January was already out of print when our yearbook was published in the fall.

As we struggled to become truly international, our yearbook became more and more extensive, and expensive. We now have the possibility of publishing an unlimited number of texts and images – in as many languages as we want to.

For reasons of translation costs – that cannot be avoided – we are confining ourselves to German and English for the time being.

Now just look around and enjoy our website, and with almost every visit you will find interesting novelties. By means of the navigation bars you can find everything sorted by headings that you formerly found in our yearbook.

Additionally our website offers a number of new topics that our yearbook could never have contained to such an extent. Just see for yourselves!

The most sensational innovation is our international online database for contemporary book art called b-art1. The database corresponds to the middle part of our yearbook where new publications and available works of book artists were presented.

From the beginning this database contains about 600 titles and hopefully will grow quickly with many addtional titles.
The database serves the following functions:

b-art1 is the international forum for new publications in the area of contemporary book art

b-art1 is a continually expanding and deepening source for investigation and research

b-art1 is a lasting “archive” where book artists can permanently record descriptions and images of their complete works forever

b-art1 is a market-place where collectors and book artists can come together via the internet.

Most of the information on the website and in the database is free.

To finance the costs of the editorial work, the server, hosting, data maintenance, security, and permanent extension of our offerings, some functions are restricted to our subscribers. If you are a dedicated collector or a professional user, it could pay for you to subscribe.

We hope to have fortune on our side with the intention of offering book arts a global showroom through www.forumbookart.com and our database b-art1. Please support us in realizing this by recommending us to your bibliophile friends and acquaintances.

Heinz Stefan Bartkowiak
(Publisher)