Penguins' Progress

The publishers of London's Penguin Books, who have sold more than 180 million paperbacks at 10-c- to 70-c- apiece, are working up something special for art lovers: a 48-volume Pelican History of Art, bound in cloth covers and priced at $8.50 a volume. The new series, to be published over the next twelve years, will replace the only two comprehensive histories of art in existence--one in French, one in German and both now out of date.

When Penguin first started the project six years ago, it picked as its editor Nikolaus Pevsner, Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge, and gave him a budget of $700,000 to get the job done. He laid out an ambitious program, including seven volumes for ancient art, four more for the Far East, seven for Britain, six for Italy, and six for the Americas, Spain, Germany and Holland. To write them, he picked such experts as Charles Seymour Jr. from Yale, Paul Frankl from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and John Pope-Hennessy from Britain's Victoria & Albert Museum. Last week the first two volumes of the new history were on sale in Britain (the U.S. edition comes out in mid-June), and they were all Penguin had promised. The two:

Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, by the University of Birmingham's E. K. Waterhouse, begins with the age of Holbein and Henry VIII, moves on through Van Dyck and Hogarth to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough and the 18th century classicists. Backing up the text are 192 pages of black & white reproductions.

The Art and Architecture of India, by Harvard Professor Benjamin Rowland, covers 4,000 years of history in 269 pages of text and 190 pages of photographs, touches on everything from India's complex civilization of 2500 B.C. to the fantastic, Buddha-studded temples of 8th-9th century Java.

Editor Pevsner has two more volumes, on France and Britain, in the works for 1953, four more for 1954. And he has the best brains in art working on others--so many, in fact, that the London Times Literary Supplement once groused that "the Pelican History of Art is monopolizing many of our leading authorities."

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