Cornelliana: When Is an Exhibition Catalogue Exasperatingly Unhelpful? UPDATED

From all of the fascinating, voluminous documentation of Joseph Cornell's multi-faceted oeuvre at the engrossing retrospective of his work that I caught on its final day, Sunday, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, one crucial piece of documentation was conspicuously missing:

The show's catalogue.

In addition (or should I say, subtraction), the well received 1997 biography of Cornell by Deborah Solomon was absent from the museum's bookstore, whose clerk told me that it had sold out. That too was strange, because the paperback edition of "Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell" was published in 2004 by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, just a short distance away. BMFA offers it for sale on its own website.

But the Cornell show's 392-page catalogue (above), with text by curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan of the Peabody Essex, never even made it into the bookstore. That's because it still hasn't been published, even though this was the show's second venue (after the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which co-organized it).

Laura Baptiste, public relations head at SAAM, had this to say about the delay:

The Cornell catalogue is being produced by PEM in Salem. (We divided the co-organization so SAAM handled the exhibition and PEM handled the book). I don't know what has caused the delays. I certainly was disappointed not to have had the book last fall.

My e-mail to Donna Desrochers, public relations manager at PEM, has thus far gone unanswered. Baptiste had also forwarded my SAAM e-mail to Desrochers, so she's been pestered twice. (UPDATE: She has now replied. See below.)

When I love a show as much as I did this one, I need to bring it home with me in a publication. So I settled for the bookstore's one slim offering. "Imagine Joseph Cornell," published specifically for PEM's installation, offers some images, two brief Hartigan essays, a bibliography and an exhibition checklist.

The full-blown catalogue, Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, is now due to be published on Oct. 15, shortly after the show opens at its third and final stop, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA's website optimistically announces that the catalogue is "available...in the MuseumStore." You can order it there online now, on a page that provides no warning of its unavailability for two more months.

In case you haven't figured it out, the other closing show that I reluctantly had to forego while I was in the Boston area was devoted to that other illustrious Nyack native, Edward Hopper. I've seen a lot of Hopper, and I've been often to the BMFA, so I chose to ride my broom to Salem.

UPDATE: Click link below for Donna Desrochers' reply.