Checking on eligibility of Das Museum

David Grigg

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Apr 16, 2018, 11:02:19 PM4/16/18

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I found this great resource of pre-1923 images — a German publication of 11 volumes called “Das Museum”

All volumes are in HathiTrust and Internet Archive and labelled public domain in the United States. Both sites say the publication date was 1896, and indeed the series editor died in 1910.

The problem is that there is no publication date in the books themselves.

The HathiTrust link to the first volume is here: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t6qz6ks1q

Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/dasmuseumeineanl01spem

The question, of course, is whether you will accept this as a source of PD proof.

Alex Cabal

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Apr 16, 2018, 11:39:06 PM4/16/18

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Honestly I'm not sure. Without further information from an expert this probably falls under the "orphan work" category. I've declined books in the past that don't have publication years in them, and while it may seem open-and-shut that the author is also the publisher, actually the Spemann publishing house was a bigger company, just under his name. Much like Houghton-Mifflin for example.

If you think this is a good resource then it may be worth getting in touch with an expert who can better speak to the publication history of these volumes. If they're mentioned in other books or company records as having been published in a certain year, then that would be all we need. Someone at some point at least made an educated guess, because it says 1896 on there. The question is how they arrived at that number.

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David Grigg

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Apr 16, 2018, 11:58:54 PM4/16/18

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I think it's a great resource, so it's definitely worth trying to prove its publication date. I'll see what I can do.

I've removed a couple of images from my "Potential Cover" gallery for which I was relying on Das Museum for PD proof. Hopefully I'll be able to add them back eventually.

David Grigg

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Apr 17, 2018, 12:21:46 AM4/17/18

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OK, this is just a quick first stab, but I think a convincing one. Here goes:

This book: A Bibliographical Guide to Cavallini and the Florentine Painters .. by Stanley Lothrop (https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015034634033) has a publication date on its cover of 1917.
On page 41 the author cites the Spemann series (by its long subtitle) in the bibliography for the chapter on Andrea del Castagno.
It cites the specific article on Castagno in Volume VII of the Das Museum series and gives a page number.
You can check that that article is indeed in Volume VII of Das Museum here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=gri.ark:/13960/t5n91s39r;view=1up;seq=31
If we accept the publication date of Lothrop's book, then clearly he can only cite an earlier work already published.

Citation from Lothrop's book here:

Will that do? I can keep looking of course, but this is the kind of thing I was wanting to find.

David Grigg

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Apr 17, 2018, 12:43:08 AM4/17/18

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It's also listed in this catalogue Catalogus van de Provinciale bibliotheek van Zeeland ... v. 5.Zealand published in 1911, so clearly Das Museum is an earlier work.

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b153501

Alex Cabal

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Apr 17, 2018, 5:39:57 PM4/17/18

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That's some great detective work! I think that's exactly what we need to confirm a pre-1923 publication date. So, let's go ahead and use it. Thanks and great work!

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David Grigg

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Apr 17, 2018, 7:25:06 PM4/17/18

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That's wonderful, because it really is a great resource.

In English, the title of this 11 volume work is "The Museum: A guide on how to enjoy the works of fine art". As well as many individual articles on individual artists or art movements (all in German, of course), the back of each volume has about a hundred reproductions of works of art -- and the scanning which Google/Internet Archive has done is top notch, unlike many crappy scans you find of other books.

A LOT of the artworks are admittedly of medieval religious works, sculpture and so on, but there are enough 18th C and 19th C paintings to still make it a real treasure.

David Grigg

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Apr 17, 2018, 7:34:46 PM4/17/18

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Here are HathiTrust links to all the Das Museum volumes:

# Das Museum

I'll keep trawling through these and will post any good ones I find that also have good resolution digital files available, in my online gallery (https://rightword.com.au/gallery). These can also go into Evan's catalogue.

Alex Cabal

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Apr 18, 2018, 6:39:47 PM4/18/18

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Excellent, thanks, I've added it to our art resources list. Usually for
Hathi Trust you can go to the full catalog listing for the volume (not
the page scans) and they have links to the rest of the volumes there.
Very handy for a lot of the RA publications too.

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