Exhibition catalogue

[citation needed] Catalogues for art or museum exhibitions may range in scale from a single printed sheet to a lavish hardcover "coffee table book".

The advent of cheap colour-printing in the 1960s transformed what had usually been simple "handlists" with several works to each page into large scale "descriptive catalogues" that are intended as both contributions to scholarship and books likely to appeal to many general readers.

[citation needed] In the early 21st century, exhibitions that gather items from other institutions (museums, galleries, libraries, etc.)

In recent decades, exhibition catalogues have grown to prodigious sizes and may be the most comprehensive sources for even rather large subject areas.

Probably the largest to be produced were in the 1970s in a competitive spree by Italian provinces and German lander to promote the significance of their region by mounting huge exhibitions on the period when its cultural production was at its peak.

Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern from Cologne of 1978, with a further two volumes published in 1980 on a colloquium held in conjunction with the exhibition.

However, exceptions do exist: the catalogue of an exhibition of the photographs of Nakaji Yasui was produced via an independent publisher and distributed as a regular book.