Art history publishing

To quantify trends in art history publishing, data were collected on the total number of art history-relatedtitles published annually by university presses between 1985 and 2005, as listed in the Bowker Global Books in Print database, themost comprehensive source of data on books published in the United States. (For more information about this database and the searchmethods used to identify relevant titles, please see Appendix A.) In addition, more than 3,000 art history-related titles publishedby eight key university presses during the same 20-year period were reviewed on a title-by-title basis in order to track the number ofsingle-author works and museum-related works published by these eight presses. Background data were also collected on publishingtrends in general at U.S. and university presses.

In 2004, the U.S. book industry took in revenues of more than $9.5 billion across all market categories.Art books accounted for 2.6% of these revenues, or about $185 million. (Data for art history books as a subcategory of "art" arenot available, but they probably represent about 20% of revenues in the art book category.)

There were more than 6,500 art-related titles published in 2004, or about 3.7% of the total output of the U.S.book industry. The number of art books published annually in the U.S. has increased by 69% since 1993, consistent with the overallincrease in the number of books published in all categories since 1993 (74%).

About 20 percent of the art-related titles published in 2004 could be classified as "art history" titles,based on a search of the Bowker Global Books in Print database. From this search, it is estimated that about 1,330 art historytitles were published annually between 2000 and 2004 by all U.S. presses. Of these, about 390 titles per year (or about 30%) werepublished by university presses.

While the bulk of "art history" titles appear to be published by nonacademic presses, this report focusesprimarily on the output of university presses, for the following reasons:

• A major concern of this project is to assess current opportunities for art historians to publish scholarly monographs,especially first books. While many books published by nonacademic presses may be classifiable as "art history," most scholarly bookstend to be published by university presses.
• Where a book gets published matters a great deal insofar as professional advancement is concerned. In reviewing candidates fortenure or promotion, academic committees tend to give far more weight to books published by academic presses than they do to bookspublished by nonacademic presses. Hence, university presses tend to be the primary outlet for art history scholars seekingpublication.

In 2004, university presses published an estimated 14,500 titles. Of these, 472 (or 3.3%) were arts-related.Unlike the rest of the publishing industry (the output of which has increased by 74% since 1993), the number of arts-related titlespublished by university presses has not changed much since the mid-1990s. In 1995, for example, university presses published 471titles in the arts, virtually identical to their output in 2004. There was a short-lived period of growth in the number ofarts-related titles published between 1993 and 2000 (from 418 to 565 per year, an increase of 35%). But between 2000 and 2004, thenumber of arts-related titles published by university presses declined by 16%.