![]() ![]() It is partly the illustrations, many of which may have been selected from the Warburg Institute's photographic archive where I worked one day a week as a postgraduate student in the late 1970s. It is partly the typographic layout, so characteristic of Phaidon Press, the publishing house set up by Béla Horovitz in Vienna in the 1920s and responsible for so many of the books that I read as a student. It is partly the smell of postwar art paper, which is slightly of sick. Opening The Story of Art again after so many years sets off a train of associations. Mine is a reprint of the revised and enlarged edition published in 1966. They all still sit in my office on the top shelf, the cornerstone of my art historical library. It has travelled with me ever since, alongside Art and Illusion and Norm and Form and Gombrich's other collected writings, beginning with Meditations on a Hobby Horse and including his brilliant short essay, In Search of Cultural History. I was studying for history of art A level and the person with whom I was sharing a study at school rightly thought that it might be useful. I was given my copy of Ernst Gombrich's The Story of Art, first published in 1950, when I was 15. ![]()
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