The Romance of Ruins
The Search for Ancient Ionia · 1764
Sir John Soane's Museum
2021 | 215 × 245mm | 240pp
A Survivor in the Ruins. For any of the other years covered by this website we would have had the choice of numerous exhibition catalogues to feature. They have been our stock-in-trade for thirty years. However, this publication is the only catalogue from the year of lockdowns and museum closures. So it stands as a valiant sole survivor of the pandemic.
As luck would have it, the months of enforced isolation seem to have been a boom time for the sale of books and the gap left by cancelled exhibitions has been filled by a slew of work for publishers: from doorstops for Rizzoli New York to poetry pamphlets for Mariscat Press, with an interesting run of books for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in between.