ABSTRACT
As foreign travel and the mass media have aroused increasing interest in the visual arts in our own century, museums, galleries and commercial dealers in artworks have multiplied and, correspondingly, so has the literature of art. A bewildering array of books on art has become available, although, ironically, it remains difficult enough to find bookshops prepared to stock any range in the more serious art books. This chapter is intended as a guide to the types of art-historical literature that the sixth-form student or the firstyear undergraduate is likely to encounter. The literature of History of Art naturally reflects the diversity of approach to the subject discussed in Chapter 2. Here, however, we are not concerned in any way to discuss the content of books that are mentioned or to assess the merit of any particular work. In so far as titles and authors are mentioned, they have been chosen only because they provide suitable examples of certain classes of literature. Additionally, the reader will find in this chapter a short introduction to the retrieval of art historical information stored electronically.
