Word: bettmann
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After 45 pictorial years, the Bettmann Archive is sold...
...harried advertising executive was on the phone, demanding a print of the Mona Lisa. Since he was talking to Manhattan's Bettmann Archive Inc., which has more than 5 million pictorial representations covering every subject from cave painting to moon walking, he had certainly called the right place. Did he want black and white or color? "I don't want the usual thing!" barked the adman. "How about a side view?" It was one of the few requests that the archive has ever been unable to fill...
...archive was founded in 1936 with two steamer trunks of old prints brought out of Nazi Germany by a scholarly, enterprising Jewish immigrant named Otto Bettmann. Since then, Bettmann, who has a Ph.D. in history from the university of his native Leipzig, has built it into one of the nation's leading suppliers of historical illustrations to book publishers, magazines, television and films. Some of the archive's vast repository has even showed up on T shirts and cereal boxes. Last week the founder-now a dapper, energetic 77-and Hans P. Kraus, a Manhattan rare-book dealer...
...Bettmann the sale is not a misty-eyed occasion. "I hate nostalgia," he says, stroking his neat, silver goatee, "but I've made a hell of a living from it." Indeed, one of the nine books he wrote or collaborated on is titled The Good Old Days-They Were Terrible. Bettmann is one of those rare creatures, an optimistic humanist. His belief that the world is not going directly to ruin has led to one of the main reasons for the archive's success: historical pictures add a depth of understanding to current events. Explains Bettmann: "Why show...
...what he was told by many concerned people." Carter's act of open-mindedness was truly courageous, by most measures, and led to a clearer picture of the need for more defense spending, ending the Turkish arms embargo, searching for better ways to help beleaguered friends. But then THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE Carter's political weakness surfaced. Talking tough was a way to rally American voters and foreign leaders, a bit of saber rattling that almost seemed to fulfill a script lightly pondered last fall by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Talking to some congressional aides, Brzezinski said it might...