By NOAM COHEN, New York Times , -Published: October 30, 2011
Photo - Andrew Testa for The New York Times - The Dover Bookshop, where a collection of animal illustrations from the 19th century is the best-selling book.
THE sign in blue lettering read “Copyright-Free Images,” which may not rank with “Zero Percent Financing” or “Everything Must Go” when it comes to sales pitches. But it does have “free” in it, and it was enough to catch my eye while visiting London.
The sign was displayed on the storefront of the Dover Bookshop on Earlham Street in Covent Garden, tucked among the Japanese clothing outlets and graphic design stores. You won’t find best sellers or works of great literature there, or even many large, glossy coffee-table books. The books that dominate the shelves — large paperbacks with prosaic titles like “Animals” or “Plants” or “Hands” — are more like catalogs of random images that have one thing in common: their age.
Dating largely from the 19th century and culled from old magazines, advertisements and books, these pictures are not covered by copyright laws. Artists around the world can use the images any way they want — cut and copied, altered or combined. No one “owns” them anymore.
Artists describe these books of “clip art” as a spur to creativity — a way to conjure up the curved outline of a lion or the way a hand grasps a hammer. But they are also ready-made images, often of high quality, that can be easily reused or repurposed.
“We get graphic artists, designers, tattoo artists, people in education in schools,” said Stuart Tegg, 44, the assistant manager of the store, as he helped pack up a book of old maps and medieval illuminated letters for a man who said he was a book-jacket designer from Edinburgh.
“Sometimes they are looking for inspiration, sometimes a specific image — they chat you up, ‘Do you have a certain image?’ ” Mr. Tegg said.
Tattoo artists like to look at the drawings of old pistols, he said. One recent customer asked if any of the books had a picture of “a fruit pie.” Mr. Tegg found one in a book of Victorian-era illustrations, and made a sale.
The experience of browsing this bookstore, which opened in 1986, is thoroughly pre-Internet; you walk down short aisles, stopping to page through images that often come printed in different sizes so they can literally be cut and pasted onto a design. What’s more, the store challenges the idea that the Internet has created a mash-up culture, whether in the sampling of older music in new songs or the combination of two images using Photoshop.
Full story at New York Times.
Dating largely from the 19th century and culled from old magazines, advertisements and books, these pictures are not covered by copyright laws. Artists around the world can use the images any way they want — cut and copied, altered or combined. No one “owns” them anymore.
Artists describe these books of “clip art” as a spur to creativity — a way to conjure up the curved outline of a lion or the way a hand grasps a hammer. But they are also ready-made images, often of high quality, that can be easily reused or repurposed.
“We get graphic artists, designers, tattoo artists, people in education in schools,” said Stuart Tegg, 44, the assistant manager of the store, as he helped pack up a book of old maps and medieval illuminated letters for a man who said he was a book-jacket designer from Edinburgh.
“Sometimes they are looking for inspiration, sometimes a specific image — they chat you up, ‘Do you have a certain image?’ ” Mr. Tegg said.
Tattoo artists like to look at the drawings of old pistols, he said. One recent customer asked if any of the books had a picture of “a fruit pie.” Mr. Tegg found one in a book of Victorian-era illustrations, and made a sale.
The experience of browsing this bookstore, which opened in 1986, is thoroughly pre-Internet; you walk down short aisles, stopping to page through images that often come printed in different sizes so they can literally be cut and pasted onto a design. What’s more, the store challenges the idea that the Internet has created a mash-up culture, whether in the sampling of older music in new songs or the combination of two images using Photoshop.
Full story at New York Times.
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