An Exhibition of Optimism
Medlock sees this situation cropping up often across the country: If the museum store manager can come up with convincing evidence books don’t sell as well as other merchandise, back to the storage room they go.
That’s undoubtedly a driving force behind the increasing stream of requests Fidler fields from museums looking to strike deals with Yale University Press, which maintains 13 exclusive partnerships with institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Paul Mellon Centre, the Jewish Museum, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. Lured by the sweet thought of more sales channels, including bookstores that still buy personally from house representatives, Amazon.com and large Web sites, Yale and other distributed art publishers have become the Holy Grail for museum publishing divisions.