Book Wyvern Collection Medieval and Later Ivory Carvings and Small Carvings - Thames & Hudson

This volume, the second catalog of the Wyvern collection, focuses on an outstanding group of medieval ivory sculptures and small carvings, which is the best private collection of its kind. The book features works from every period of the Middle Ages, including rare examples from early Christianity; spectacular panels from 10th-century Constantinople workshops; objects produced by renowned sculptors active in southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries; and several important works from the Romanesque period. At the heart of the collection is an exceptional group of Gothic ivory carvings, with the most notable highlight being one of the most significant secular ivory pieces discovered in recent years. The collection also includes many small sculptures made of amber, hard stone, jet, wood, and mother-of-pearl.

Beyond their masterful craftsmanship, many of these objects have remarkable histories within famous aristocratic or ecclesiastical collections. This is a valuable opportunity to study these miniature masterpieces.

Thames & Hudson was founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Their greatest passion and mission was to create a “museum without walls” and to make the world of art accessible to a broad audience, as well as to leading scholars. To reflect an international perspective, the company’s name combined the rivers flowing through London and New York, represented in its logo by two dolphins symbolizing friendship and intelligence, one facing east and the other west, suggesting a connection between the Old World and the New.

Today, still an independent family business, Thames & Hudson is one of the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books, with over 2,000 titles in print. It publishes high-quality books across all areas of visual creativity: arts (fine arts, applied arts, decorative arts, performing arts), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film, and music, as well as archaeology, history, and popular culture. The company is also expanding its list of children’s books. Headquartered in London with a sister company in New York and branches in Melbourne, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Paris, another subsidiary, Interart, distributes English-language books in France.

History of Thames & Hudson

Walter Neurath was born in Vienna in 1903. In 1938, he left his hometown—where he ran an art gallery and published illustrated books—for London. Initially, he worked as a production director at Adprint, a company founded by Viennese émigré Wolfgang Foge. Neurath and Foge developed a pioneering concept of what is now called book packaging (or co-publishing), where book ideas are developed, commissioned, produced, and sold to publishers operating in different markets and languages to create large editions and reduce unit production costs. Neurath’s concept was the first of many innovations introduced into the publishing world by Thames & Hudson.

Seeking to continue book packaging in a second edition and recognizing the need to amortize the high costs of producing illustrated books, Neurath founded his own publishing house, establishing offices in London and New York in the fall of 1949. Eva Neurath, who arrived in London from Berlin in 1939, was a co-founder.

Of the ten titles published on Thames & Hudson’s first list in 1950, English Cathedrals, with photographs by Martin Hürlimann, was the first and most successful. The company’s strong belief in the longevity of books, which remained in print until 1971, was evident from the start. Also in the first year, Albert Einstein’s “Out of My Later Years” was published, an early indicator of the breadth of the program. As the list gradually expanded from ten titles in 1950 to 144 in 1955, the company moved its offices from High Holborn and, in 1956, relocated to a Georgian townhouse at 30 Bloomsbury Street, near Bedford Square, which became the epicenter of book publishing in London. The manufacturing remained at this address, eventually expanding to five buildings by 1999, when it returned to High Holborn.