The Phaidon Press : a Retrospect and Prospectus.
THE brochure issued to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Phaidon Press records an educational achieve- ment without parallel in contemporary publishing. For a quarter of a century the volumes issued by this firm have been distinguished by seriousness of purpose and vividness of presentation. Well pro- duced and edited with imagination, they have set a standard in art book production, and have brought the visual riches of the past within reach of the ordinary reader's purse. In the aggregate the Phaidon volumes must have exercised a considerable influence on taste, and if today a larger public than at any previous time is responsive to the sculpture of Michelangelo and Donatello or to the paintings of Frans Hals and Velazquez, some of the credit for this must go to the Phaidon monographs dealing with these artists. Since the firm left Vienna and became established in this country, the scope of its publications has undergone a change, and it is particu- larly welcome that recent volumes should have been devoted to Sandby, Hogarth and that classic history of English painting, Red- grave's Century of British Painters, as well as to contemporary British artists. Three further volumes are announced in the series of catalogues of the old master drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Some of the earliest books published in Vienna by the Phaidon Press were editions of Mommsen and Frobenius, and it is satisfactory to learn that its plans have provided not merely for volumes on individual artists, but for translations of the Lucrezia Borgia of Gregorovius and the Maitres d'Autrefois of Fromentin.
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