by Beth Slater
Staff Writer
How often does $4 make someone the owner of a book about the Sistine Chapel ceiling and another that inserts humorous captions into some of the world’s most famous art?
Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art put more than 1,600 books up for sale last week from the collection of the former Jacksonville Art Museum library. Items were priced from 50 cents, for guidebooks to various museums, to $4 for large books like art encyclopedias.
Jane Craven, president and CEO of JMoMA, said the museum raised $3,000.
The book sale, originally scheduled for Wednesday-Friday, continued through to Monday. Craven said the sale was more popular than expected.
“We noticed a lot of artists in Jacksonville stopped and bought books,” she said.
The books were part of the library that did not fit the museum’s current mission of focusing on visual art created after 1945. The money raised will stock the museum’s library with new books about modern art.
“We’ll start out with art survey books, then get some art encyclopedias, then we’ll get books about artists in our collection. There is a collection of about 700 works that the museum owns,” Craven said.
The items sold included books on art history, art instruction, individual artists and works, guidebooks and catalogs for various museums and old copies of Architectural Digest magazine.