Big books of classic art

Hi. I acquired a few big books like in the pics. I tried looking up some on Google and ebay but could only find the individual prints for sale. These have 20+ per book and are good quality, most have wax paper between each piece. From what I can tell there all Italian artists(maybe?).. this is not really an area of interest for me so I'm really trying to find out if there's any value in the collection or what I should do with it. All the info I really have is that they came from the south Georgia area. This is just photos from one book also its pretty big, about 15×20

Please.. if you have anything that's not helpful or positive to say, keep it to yourself.

 

Nahhh, I'm sorry.....
U want our help......then u don't get to tell us what we can and can not say here...

U think we work for you ?

 

u should consider someplace else...where u can control the conversation....

 

Googling "A folio of prints: Masacchio Amilcare Pizzi Art Publications" produced a few results for me. More than that I can't help

 

No publication date? Might be in the back of the book. From the page you show that combines picture and text, it looks like the picture has been "tipped in". That means it's a separate piece of paper that was glued into a space left above the printed text. This was common practice for color illustrations until well into the 1960s. The costs of color printing were high enough that it was cheaper to generate color images separately from monochrome text.

I know that some books, even with B&W illustrations, were published with the text as one volume and the prints as an accompanying portfolio. I think that the size of the prints was the consideration there, and effectively matching them to their place in the text.

But if you wanted color pictures of art, you either got a book with tipped in plates, or you got a volume of text and a portfolio of prints.

Some of these were produced effectively like magazines. I have a couple of copies of a series called "The Masters". You could buy the series in bookstores or at newsstands, or you could subscribe to it. They were issued sequentially like periodicals... dozens upon dozens of monograms on this artist or that with a short text essay followed by a dozen or so large color prints - nice color, state of the art printing for its time. These prints are bound in, but there were other similar series where the prints were unbound.

They're of very little value today because access to the images, and to color printing, is no longer an issue, and the texts are about as important as the articles in Playboy.

The prints are still very nice. The color is still good and they can have a nice, nostalgic, old-timey look to them, but they have little monetary value.

 

That's about as positive as it gets, Ahab. Sometimes it is just the way it is.
(Hope this was helpful.)

 

Sworders auction house in England has auctioned this book before. You can look it up there.

 

There are some of this edition currently up for sale, listed in abebooks dot com. These are asking prices, of course. Not successful sales.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Se...cci chapel church santa&cm_sp=mbc-_-ats-_-all

 

@Figtree3 is oh so correct . I waited a very long time and 2 books in a set that usually go for $175 each were bought for $125 for the pair by me: Not art books, but limited print railroad books that seem to bring big bucks because of limited publication numbers . Anyone can ask anything, but the reality is some of us have a budget and will wait till the cows come home till the right price shows up and then spring like a hungry wildcat !