Art Historian Francis V. O’Connor has published his book, The Mural in America: Wall Painting in the United State from Prehistory to the Present, online — free, usable by all. It’s not an e-book. It’s a book in the form of a website.
O’Connor, you’ll recall, wrote the catalogue raisonne for Jackson Pollock, along with Eugene V. Thaw, among other books. He has been working on this mural book for 30 years and, as he explains on the website for it, he could not get a publisher for a book of this size and scope, and decided instead to put the whole thing up online.
The Mural in America website is probably not what most people envision as online publishing — it’s too traditional. You can go to a tab called Table of Contents, and choose from chapters and topics with the chapters, just as you can flip to a page in a paper book. When you choose a chapter, or topic, you turn the page by clicking on “Next” at the bottom of the text (or “Previous” if you want to go back). The website/book is searchable.
The illustrations are way too few and too small, like this on, at right, for Brumidi’s Capitol rotunda (Chapter 13) for a book about murals.
But then again, O’Connor warns that he didn’t write a picture book.
He provides a helpful “How to Read This Book” on the site, and even explains how he wants it footnoted.
In his announcement of the book, O’Connor wrote:
The purpose of this electronic publication is to make available to scholars, students, muralists, artists and the general public – at no charge – the text of a book that fills a gap in our understanding of the development of American art and culture. Being readable, citable, searchable and augmentable, my ambition is that this book shall grow over the years – and inspire more scholarly research in the field of the American mural that this book opens up for the first time.
That’s a real service.