Chances are that anyone who served their time as a student of art, design, architecture or art history over the last 40 years or so will have gone through a love-hate relationship with Thames &Hudson's World of Art series of books. These ubiquitous, universally familiar, compact, squarishly proportioned volumes, with their shiny black jackets and dolphin logo, provided - and continue to provide - an invaluable introduction to art and artists across the span of history. They do so both in broad swathes - as with Herbert Read's best-selling Concise History of Modern Painting - and in pernickety close-up, as with Hans Richter's wonderfully precise account of Dada.
To discerning students, it quickly became apparent that the World of Art books were invariably well-informed, as well as being profusely illustrated (increasingly, as time went by, with good quality colour plates), and often strongly argued and partisan in their viewpoint. Their range and reliability were extraordinary. Chances were that, no matter what your field of interest, or what essay you had to write, you could scan the uniform row of T& spines and find a book on it, and be pretty sure it would deliver the goods, which meant that more and more of them tended to find a home on your bookshelves.
All of which accounts for the love, but what of the hate? Well, it was more frustration than hate. Because of the uniform, squat format and the smallish size (a good compromise between standard paperback and expensively large), the illustrations tended to provide tantalising hints of what the artworks might be like on a larger scale.
Although, from as far back as 1962, the books were usually published in both hardback and paperback, for reasons of economy you tended to buy the paperbacks (which were - and are - eminently affordable and exceptionally good value). Paperbacks are generally perfect bound and difficult to open flat, making the illustrations slightly more problematic still.
The World of Art series is celebrating its 45th birthday. Since its inception, the titles have sold a staggering 26 million volumes worldwide. For a while, back in the early 1990s, it seemed that, with the consolidation of the new art history on one hand, and the sudden populist success of Brit Art on the other, the series might be perceived as dated. More recently, other publishers, including Everyman, Phaidon and Oxford University Press, catching up with the art history revolution, have introduced what might be termed revisionist series of art history books.
These include, notably, Oxford's extremely ambitious History of Art and Phaidon's Art and Ideas series, both of which are seriously global in scope and aim at offering a novel slant and a high academic standard of authorship.
Phaidon also relaunched its Colour Library monographs and tackled the late-20th century art scene with its Contemporary Artists monographs. Like Thames &Hudson, it has also experimented with more populist user-friendly formats, as in The Art Book and its various derivatives.
Back in the late 1970s, it seemed as if every art student carried a copy of Edward Lucie-Smith's World of Art book, Movements in Art Since 1945. In the late 1990s, it was likely to be the Everyman Art of Today by Brandon Taylor. Yet if it seemed to falter briefly, the World of Art certainly learned to adjust to changing times. Michael Rush's 1999 World of Art volume, New Media in Late 20th Century Art is a fast-selling, current student staple.
The historical record suggests the series, under the guidance of Nikos Stangos, was consistently quick to pick up on and respond to changes in the art world. Environments and Happenings, a generous survey of environmental-related art initiatives, for example, was first produced as early as 1974. Whitney Chadwick's Women, Art and Society, an extremely popular title, was first published in 1990. A wide-ranging and incisive volume on Pop Art was first published in 1966.
More, though, despite climatological shifts in the discipline of art history, the World of Art back catalogue has managed to retain credibility. Ironically enough, it has done so largely thanks to what might be called its incidental strengths - that is, its lack of uniformity, despite the uniformity of its presentation. For within the apparent unity of the whole there is a wealth of valuable, even idiosyncratic, individuality. The series manages to be encyclopedic without the strictures of being an encyclopaedia.
Sometimes the writers are married perfectly to their subjects, but rarely are they seriously mismatched. Sometimes the books reproduce invaluable, primary historical documentation - as with the volume on the American Abstract Expressionists, which features fascinating writings by and conversations with the artists, as well as thoughtful mini-portfolios of the work of each of them.
Yet despite the incorporation of such invaluable, primary, authoritative sources, the series never seemed too academic, too esoteric for the casually interested reader. Hence the enduring popularity of a book such as Herbert Read's History of Modern Painting primer, which, remarkably for an art book, has sold in excess of a million copies.
To celebrate its 45th birthday, Thames &Hudson has redesigned and relaunched the series. Mindful of the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it rule, the designers have been cautious not to dispense with the features that contribute to its familiarity. The spines are still black, albeit with flashes of red, and there is greater use of white on the jackets, front and back. There are updated editions of some titles, including Lucie-Smith's Movements in Art since 1945, and exploratory new ones, such as James Trilling's The Language of Ornament.
Not much new there, then, one might be tempted to conclude. Which, in this case, is all to the good. It's encouraging to see the publishers reaffirming their commitment to a series that is, on balance, regarded with much more love than hate, and that amounts to a valuable cultural resource in itself.