Word: bettmann
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...MARRIAGE MADE IN CYBERheaven. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who amassed his fortune by anticipating the computer future, announced last week that he had bought the incomparable archive of Otto Bettmann, who made his fortune excavating the photographic past. The value of the deal was not disclosed, but it was estimated to be millions of dollars...
Universal accessibility was pretty much what Bettmann had in mind when he started his picture-lending library nearly 50 years ago. The son of a German-Jewish surgeon, Bettmann was 12 when he began collecting discarded medical illustrations from his father's wastebasket. As curator of rare books at the Berlin State Arts Museum, he began obsessively photographing illustrations, lithographs, old prints and any other images within focal reach of his Leica. In 1935 Bettmann fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. with $5 and his father's best suit. He also took with him two steamer trunks of exposed...
Setting up shop in New York City, Bettmann rented out his reproductions for one-time use to publishers, educators, scholars, ad agencies, and later to television and movie studios, charging fees ranging from $50 to $3,000. At the same time he kept buying news pictures and photographic libraries, cataloging them by an arcane system that Bettmann insisted was based on the intricate complexities of a Bach fugue. "It's all in the music," he said with a twinkle in his eyes...
COVER Photomontage. Photograph for TIME by James Porto combined with a Depression-era scene from the Bettmann Archive; digital imaging by Alejandro Arce
Cover: Photograph by U.P.I. -- Bettmann...