By examining images of the imaginary Chinese animal Sum Xu, this essay engages with questions about artistic origins and authorial originality, two art-historical concepts that so often exclude peripheral artists and their supposedly derivative artworks. Drawn by the Polish-Ruthenian Jesuit Michał Boym, the Sum Xu challenges the conventional accounts of images’ origins. As will be demonstrated, Boym’s image cannot be associated with a single place; its visual form derives its appearance from a multitude of sources, and the creature’s erratic afterlives further destabilize the concept of origin as an authorial act tied to a singular moment in space and time.

Miguel Orozco's Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso Posters is quite different from previous compendiums of his affiches. It contains 412 posters included in the Czwiklitzer DTV catalogue, which in total has 475 entries. But the Orozco catalogue gives full entries to 31 'subordinate' posters that in the German catalogue appear as letters accompanying the main entry, i.e., the first poster of the series. This means that the present compendium uses in fact only 381 'main' Czwiklitzer DTV entries and discards 94 Czwiklitzer posters, not counting the 'subordinate' posters we have not included. And it only oncludes 346 out of the total 630 posters contained in the Rodrigo catalogue, leaving out some 280 of them. None of the posters left out has any intrinsic artistic value.

The main objective, the main contribution the Orozco book makes is to put the emphasis on the main, the noble Picasso posters, providing as far as possible a description of Picasso's involvement and telling the story of the work. It also incorporates some 100 additional items, not counted in the total of 947 main entries, which seek to clarify and or support the value of the poster or to explain the origin of the illustration used. It also unveils over one hundred posters not covered by either Czwiklitzer or Rodrigo. It uncovers many Picasso poster projects that had not been tackled by the catalogues raisonnés. They undoubtedly have an interest in the study of Picasso's poster making endeavours. And last but not least, it publicizes tens of Picasso poster projects or realisations that were designed as posters and were displayed as such, but were formally only newspaper covers. They were actually poster-sized and were posted as posters in the press-kiosks in the cities they were published.

Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834) was a man of many talents; carriage-maker, artist, inventor, lithographer, publisher, bookseller, publicist and entrepreneur, he also worked tirelessly to raise funds to relieve  his native  Germany after the devastation of Napoleon's invasion. He published works which have created the most lasting visual images of the Regency period; illustrating and promoting the latest styles and fashions in dress, furnishing, domestic architecture, gardens and foreign travel. His monthly magazine The Repository of Arts (1809-1828) remains a primary visual source book for later historians of design. His Microcosm of London (1808-10), paired the talents of Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin to create a landmark work of topographical publishing. He also promoted innovations in carriage design, water-proofing material, chemistry, lithography and steam power. 

This new biography by John Ford includes extensive new research into Ackermann's life, drawing on his papers, accounts and other untapped sources and provides a wealth of material to those interested in early modern print culture and the arts of the Regency period.

Abstract—In the spring of 2015, the author was asked to organize and direct a comprehensive inventory of the large and distinguished collection of prints at the Boston Public Library. Work- ing with the staff of the BPL and a corps of graduate students, the team located, described, and prepared for digitization a diverse collection of prints, posters, chromolithographs, drawings, and ephemera, once regarded as among the best collections in the United States. The collection was under-staffed, neglected, and adrift in a great public library that struggled to balance its commitment to public service with its status as a major national research library. This article describes the project and the next steps for the collection.

In 1922, the English writer George Somes Layard commented that: “A series of marks on a print is its diary: the fate and journey of many a masterpiece can be thereby traced until it finds at last its permanent home in the Museum.” Layard succinctly foreshadowed what might now be described as the materiality, agency, and lives of these art works: their materials and production; and the markings, annotations, and signs of use that connect the human stories of artist, printmaker, print publisher, dealer, collector, and collecting institution. The potency of these narratives is magnified when prints are considered not only as individual objects, but also within, and in concert with, extant print albums.

Before the second half of the eighteenth century, collectors most commonly stored and displayed their prints in albums: book-like volumes often housed as part of a library. Since then, changing institutional display and storage preferences have resulted in the now customary presentation of prints in individual sunk or recessed mounts, rather than bound en masse. As a result, intact albums of prints (especially those preserved in the arrangements determined by eighteenth-century collectors) are rare survivors.

Much important data about the assembly of print collections in the eighteenth century—once evident in the physical characteristics of intact albums—is now diminished or lost. These physical characteristics are the primary focus of this investigation. Adhesions, foliation, annotations, bindings, and signs of use (which are often overlooked by viewers or consciously excised from eighteenth-century print albums in institutional collections) can be as intriguing as the prints contained within the albums. These material features are also marks of identity and agency: they reveal the “lives” of the albums and the hand of the collector.