Arnoldsche Art Publishers

Dear Readers,

The turbulence affecting the global financial markets and the concomitant economic changes of recent months have not been without an impact on the domestic and international book market. More publishing houses than ever are in the process of merging (and were even before the current crisis); pressures to take cost-effectiveness and profitability into consideration in planning title lists will continue to mount and the increasingly commercialised marketing strategies adopted by retail booksellers will make it even more difficult for them to give exceptional and outstanding works from the range of publications available the attention that would be desirable - not just for us as publishers but also for our discerning readers.

Despite all these changes on the book market, we, the ARNOLDSCHE team, are continuing on the course we embarked on: a paramount concern of ours is not to clutter the market with "trite" mass-produced coffee-table tomes rehashing art as a commodity but instead to offer you - as we have always done - specialised publications written by experts on a choice selection of art-related subjects and aesthetic stances you will find nowhere else.

Books are, in our eyes, precious cultural artefacts; hence we devote all our efforts to producing quality publications in which content and form dovetail down to the last detail. As you will see from the titles in our new spring programme, we view the accelerating advance of globalisation as an inducement, indeed a publishing challenge to be met with gusto: in our prospectus, you will find among our books for collectors and art lovers works on Wiener Werkstaette jewellery, a Dutch glass designer, a Japanese ceramicist, a British concept artist and three contemporary artists working in glass in Murano. We work up our wide-ranging selection of new publications, which are individually tailored to the subjects they present, as team productions in collaboration with specialist authors, museums and gallerists in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway and the US.

Just before this catalogue went to press, we received the gratifying news that "Teaching Design", a book of ours (see p. 25), has been voted one of the "most beautiful German books". This fresh success - along with all the other positive feedback we have been getting from around the world - only goes to confirm that we are right on course despite these parlous times.

We hope we have once again explored subject areas that are as exciting for you as they are for us in our spring programme and wish you a thoroughly enjoyable voyage of discovery!

Sincerely yours

Dieter Zuehlsdorff
Publisher

Dirk Allgaier
Junior Publisher