Leiden / Boston – 20 March 2012

Brill and the Frick Collection have signed an agreement to digitize c. 3,300 historical art sales catalogues from the Frick Art Reference Library for Brill’s publication Art Sales Catalogues 1600-1900 Online (ASCO).

The Frick Art Reference Library is one of the largest repositories of auction catalogs and provenance information in North America. Its collection consists of more than 90,000 catalogs, with an annual acquisitions rate of 1,500. Catalogues from more than 1,000 auction houses in Europe, Australia, and the Americas, ranging in date from the eighteenth century to the present, are represented in the collection.

Brill’s Art Sales Catalogues Online (ASCO) database, originating from the IDC imprint and now containing almost 30,000 sales catalogues from the period 1600 to 1900, will be supplemented by catalogues from the Frick library. A selection of c. 3,300 historical catalogues, not yet available in the existing database, will be added in yearly batches in the coming 5 years. These supplements will enrich the database with many unique and rare items. This not only makes these valuable texts available to a larger community of scholars, it also helps to preserve these catalogues.

The first installment of c. 700 catalogues is expected at the end of 2012/early 2013.

More information: Liesbeth Hugenholtz, email: hugenholtz@brill.nl, phone: + 31 71 5353484, http://brill.nl/asco

About BRILL
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, BRILL is a leading international academic publisher in the fields of Ancient Near East and Egypt, Middle East and Islamic Studies, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, contemporary History and History of War studies, Biblical and Religious Studies, Slavic Studies, Language & Linguistics, Biology, Human Rights and Public International Law. With offices in Leiden and Boston, BRILL today publishes more than 175 journals and around 600 new books and reference works each year. All publications are available in both print and electronic form. BRILL also markets a large number of research collections and databases with primary source material. The company’s key customers are academic and research institutions, libraries, and scholars. BRILL is a publicly traded company and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam NV. For further information please visit www.brill.nl.

About the Frick Art Reference Library (http://www.frick.org/library/)
The Frick Art Reference Library was founded in 1920 to serve “adults with a serious interest in art,” among them scholars, art professionals, collectors, and students. The Library’s book and photograph research collections relate chiefly to paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints from the fourth to the mid-twentieth centuries by European and American artists. Known internationally for its rich holdings of auction and exhibition catalogs, the Library is a leading site for collecting and provenance research. Archival materials and special collections augment the research collections with documents pertaining to the history of collecting art in America and of Henry Clay Frick’s collecting in particular.